The rest of week went by like a bad dream. I don’t think Melanie knew what to make of me but she never said anything directly. I tried to do the things we enjoyed doing, but my heart wasn’t in it and I’m sure Melanie knew. It was hard to believe at first that life just went on as normal when we got back home, that people just went about their business as usual as if nothing had happened, like in Auden’s poem, while Icarus’s wax wings melt, the horse scratches its behind and the dog goes on with its doggy life, when all I really wanted was to stop all the clocks. No, that’s not true. That’s a different poem. And I didn’t want a big fuss. I didn’t want anyone to know, especially after that abortive visit to the police. I wanted everyone to go on like the horse and the dog and not notice me, my imaginary wax wings melting as I approached the sun, falling, falling into the darkness of the sea. Icarus died. I pulled myself out of the darkness, shook myself off and went on with my life. I squeezed it all into a ball and hid it away in the deepest darkest place I could find, where it remains to this day, a dark star inside me.

In a very odd way, I feel that I’ve been feeding off it ever since, the poetry has been feeding off it, though never about it, this dark star I made of the thing that happened to me when I was on the cusp of adulthood. This dark star that I haven’t told anyone about. I think even now talking about it worries me not so much because it upsets me, though that is certainly the case, but because I’m afraid I might lose something by letting out the darkness that feeds me. Lose my muse, my creativity, my poetry. I wrote earlier that sometimes I need the darkness, and I believe this is true. But it doesn’t mean I wanted what happened.