" I thought of the opera ‘Madama Butterfly’ that I had just been listening to and saw myself as that sailor in that opera who was born into beauty but left it to chase his
American dream. I had forgotten my heart, and the home in which it beat, and now as I held a life, tightly in my arms, in my eyes, that had wounded itself and was now about to
die.

Neglect. The burning furnace.

I realized that I was never to see her, Life, again and that throughout the years when she had been there

I hath forsaken thee

lost in money, in opinion

in short, an exchange

in which we trade the means for the end (happiness),
but never realize until the end how much we have truly lost
and I.

I was at the end of my road, or at least this road.

Regret. But now was not the time.

She was still here; breathing with the wind, beating against my face that licked with the cool, cool presence.

There was still what was, what is, and for but a short time what was still to be.

I had but a few moments to make up for an entire life that I had lost. "

― , Toilet: The Novel