If only I could grip my eyebrows and tear them off my brow to burn them in an indoor twig fire would I get some sort of relief from being terribly frustrated for at least 30 minutes of every day for the past thirty years. Every time I bury my face in my hands I want to put the meat of those hands into my eye sockets and push my eyeballs in far enough to see swirling blue so that maybe I can squeeze out enough tears to appear as sad as I feel. But it seems whenever I do there is a twig fire that burns just enough to dry my tears, enticing me to pull my hands off my face exposing a phony, crooked smile for thinking about pulling hair from my brow and not from my chin. You see, I don’t want to feel any more pain. I want to be happy. It would be ludicrous for me to pinch myself again to find out one last time that this is all real, that I am stuck here until one day when I don’t want to leave. I am stuck here unless I want to bring pain upon myself more than I can ever muster. Pain that would cause even more pain for others. So I stay to feel the warmth of the twig fire. It is better to sit down to your own twig fire for 30 minutes a day than to have one minute of cold sorrow follow you wherever you go.
Vincent Van Gogh – At Eternity’s Gate 1890
Francis Erich McElroy 