These past nine months have been my gestation period. Several new ideas took residence within me, and as they struggled for dominance, I stopped writing for myself and started writing for others. But to be wholly honest, I've always written for others. On these pages, through this medium, I've sent messages with very specific individuals as their object. Though my words were often ridden with irony, ill-defined and vague metaphor, I know those words reached their target more than once. More than once, my message was decoded, understood, and responded to.

Freed of much of the need for this indirect communication, for a little while I have given straightforward sentiment an opportunity to prove its merits.

It has failed. Telling people what I think, directly and without allusion, has left me unhappier than I have been in quite some time. I have found that without the veil, few are intrigued by my features. When others lost their notion of dealing with me as akin to solving a mystery or assembling a puzzle, their interest in my affairs vanished as well.

These things happen. It is a sin I am guilty of, constantly, so I feel justice has been served in my being made the victim. In time, I will be able to say that I blame no one, and be honest in this admittance. I will not say what my truthful words on this subject are now.

I decided to become a writer, to direct all my means toward that end. I realized that this was my life's passion, and that I would need to refine my ability so as to be able to be fully prepared for the journey of seeking my goal. I started writing stories, novelistic essays, a number of short pieces of semi-polished prose that I intended to turn into a novel one day. This was my great illuminative idea.

Yet in thinking about what I would write, what living life had given me the ability and authority to write, I started thinking about my life and about the choices I had made in it since I had stopped writing in this medium, this online forum. I went even further back: a year, two. I questioned the choices I had made and did my best to make new ones. I gave, as best I could, the candid conversation and admittances that had always been requested of me, hoping to collect on the things that had been implied promises to my doing so.

But the deed ran out on that unspoken lease, and I found myself humbled and alone. I had been hoping to find a companion who would stand beside me as I had never before allowed anyone to. Instead, I found the ashes from a fire so long dead that not even smoke remained. Seeking redemption, I discovered disappointment. Disillusionment. Despair.

So now I find myself staring into a plasma screen again, having realized that there is no increased warmth in pen and paper. Writing, for me, is cold no matter the medium. Whatever the message. I write best when I am unhappy. So be it. I will embrace this sad truth and make a life for myself as best I can, with words and with actions, and in solitude.

If I can be truly loved only when I am shrouded in mystery, then let me never speak plain language again. I can only hope that I am not fooled again by the mythical possibility of a genuine understanding, of the usefulness of directly-exposed sentiment.

This is my solitary confinement. I suspect it has no door or window.

Me: Like windows?

One: In that you need to be formatted and reinstalled every so often?

Me: In that I let people see inside, but don't let them in. As opposed to a door, which does the opposite.

Within my heart, he lives in a glass cage. He's there, I can see him. We can talk. But we can't really reach each other.

Sometimes I want to touch him, and I stand and press so hard against the glass that I must be trying to break it. And our foreheads mirror each other with the strain. Our hands, yearning to clasp each other, match perfectly on either side of the transparent barrier. I close my eyes and miss him so hard my mind fills in the missing pieces. The warmth and slight dampness of his fingers. The slightly yielding firmness of his head. The mutual resistance to oneness with another that is the only valid way for two individuals to merge. We hold hands, the fingers mesh and overlap, our lips meet.

Yet I open my eyes and he is gone, the glass opaque. Is there really a room beyond it? Or merely a delusional consolation to my dangerous wishes, a tinted window in front of a brick wall?

The glass is chilled, my breath leaves a frost upon it. Each molecule of water reaffirms my existence by its presence. It comes from me, yet exists outside of me. Blocked in this way from my love, what can tell me he's real?

I cry a tear of loneliness, catch it with my finger and enjoy its brief heat. I use it to draw a heart on the glass pane, kiss my finger then make a single clear line through the heart. There is no second tear.

I turn my back on my last hope, and embrace the fate of being forsaken. And of course, when I look back the wall is clear again. His hand is still pressed flat against the glass, but his eyes are open. Being my perfect complement, he does not beg or plead. He merely looks through to me, seeing but choosing to ignore the voided heart, and says my name.

And then I am back at the glass, wiping away my betrayal and kneeling before him, my eyes wide open this time. He kneels too. Neither of us are smiling. We did, once. Our hands do their incomplete meeting again, between them the residue of my wishful thinking. There's no imagined warmth this time, no illusion of a perfect intertwining. But there's awareness of each other, and there's recognition. This time my eyes stay open. There is more than one kind of damnation.