Always. Always, you will have that melancholy subject which you turn to in your every waking moment that you are not actively focusing on your present field of vision. Always, when you let your thoughts roam, they will come back full circle to this very subject.

This subject lies at the same point on this circle; let us call this point the beginning, and given that it is a circle, the end point as well, because it is the first thing you think about when you wake and the last thing on your mind before you slumber.

Like a grain of sand irritating the flesh inside a clam, this sharp, rocky thought will itch at your mind, needling at it and tearing you asunder. And you will try to make this thought more bearable. You will try to coat this debris—this disturbance—in your shiny and lustrous mother of pearl. And you will keep coating it, and coating it, and coating it, and coating it until the thought is not so jagged and rough anymore but smooth and glossy.

And yet, so much bigger. The once tiny grain of sand eating away at your mind now sits like a giant eye in your very center, reflecting, like a crystal ball, your worries and desires.

Icarus knows this anguish more horribly than any. To have come so intimately close to something so precariously—nay, hopelessly—perfect and to let yourself, in your eagerness and willing ignorance, lay down on this crumbling cliff and tilt your chin up to the sky with closed eyes and a spreading smile. Your feathery wings spread, ready to take flight before it falls because you know it cannot last forever, and yet the warmth of the sun shining on this rocky cliff draws you in and you relish in this feeling just a moment longer.

And you still have that soft, lopsided smile on your face when the rocks crumble under you like a thousand meteors and crush your wings, and you have yet to process that you are falling, really falling. And it leaves you wondering why you were ever dimwitted and naïve enough to lay on this cliff and let yourself relax as if you did not know deep down that, given the chance, you would do it all again in a heartbeat.

You were born a lover. You can’t help it. The past will replay ceaselessly in your mind like a broken record, and you, like the ballerina in a music box, will twirl forever to these jagged notes because it is the only dance you know. The only dance you know.