I remember, quite clearly, when she said to meet, and where. It is the clearest thing she has said, and I suppose that my temptation to actually go there, comes from that clearness. Only I know that she is nothing but an idle wish of my mind: there is no one to meet, only a place and a time. And those are just names, useless labels.

My reason denies her existence, and then my reason is itself ensnared by those labels, as if it found in them a kind of pure idea. A Platonic form, if you will. Because—and here is the argument—if you can call a thing by a name you understand it, and the better the name, the better you understand. Numina, nomina. And while I can understand her reference to the Bird Kage, since I visited it earlier that night, what I can’t placate is that she named a particular time, a specific coordinate.

It may be that there is a certain component to every mind that is susceptible to insanity. Some sort of mental process that is easily entrapped by the idée fixe or the delusion of grandeur, that can bring the whole psyche to its knees. I wonder if for me it is my reason itself, which latches on to ideas and systems like a wolverine. Is it only a matter of time before it finds something that it can’t handle? Some problem whose solution is an endlessly recursive loop, one that with every turn gets tighter and tighter like St. Alowin’s necklace, until all that’s left is that line of logic, a closed, sinister infinity…my worst nightmares have this vicious demon (always strong enough by himself), in the form of a game of dominoes that I can’t stop playing, or some other ill-defined, infinite problem, or the ones in which I am tormented with the inability to keep my eyes open, or to wake.

But even then I am vaguely aware of their unreality, and I wake, sometimes with a fever. I wonder what sort of fever it is that compels me to–