Dear DQ.,

You are realizing in your experiences and travels dreams I cannot actualize in real life. At the same time you make a vicarious claim on my nightmares. Strangely, this unexplainable movement heartens me. I shouldn't hold so stringently to the bleakness, you are correct. In all events, you may take my entire world without restraint, along with all of its mist. Fog the glass with moisture from your breath and then grind it like glass between your teeth. Perhaps only then will you experience the true grain of this haunted castle.

Tomorrow, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern will escort me, in all their amusing theatricality, to visit Aleph for several days. It seems I shall see something of the road after all. I strongly hope that we are moving towards a final conclusion and resolution into normality. Horizons of significance -

My friend, I am neither feeling, nor being clear. Anon.

Cher Q.,

The toxicity of yesterday's malaise plays games with me even sillier than the daft confusions thrust at me by R&G. They are derivative human beings, and yet I experience much pleasure in my explorations of the connections between themselves, let alone between myself and them. I can hear them, fake-fencing outside the tent. They have no fixed priority beyond myself. We have travelled all day in rain and throughout I found no context stronger than a pine cone crushed beneath a carriage wheel with which to align myself.

But on to your wet boots. In our military, we have a saying that if one is going to die, one must die with one's boots on. The world has become an irrational and deadly nightmare when young men clutch sayings such as that to their chests, never dreaming about change or difference or the alternating currents of possibility lodged in places as simple as the dirt beneath a fingernail. Polonius postulated in my presence the possibility of an unestimable number of life forms, all thriving in a speck of mud. The lapels of my jacket are crusted with specks from the day's journeying. Please don't be alarmed if dried flakes spill from the creases of my letter. I hope you meet one of these fantasy organisms Polonius dreams of. I should also send you one of the devices used to peer into the private lives of progressively smaller and intricate things. At the very least, you will be spared the snow, which also marks our path. I am almost at times the fool, stepping out of the carriage, and slipping in the white and brown colors, as they fight to cancel one another out. G & R, full of high sentence, and more than a bit obtuse, clamor with all the grace of the living dead. They get their just desserts for the foolery, sitting out in the cold, warming each other with exercise conducted over the frictionating heat of wooden swords plucked from dying evergreens. I fear the futility of their theatre and yet I wish I could step into that existence which refuses awareness of itself. You've convinced me that, for the time being, the suffering associated with deep contemplation rewards the continuation of head up and shoulders back, but I would give freely all I have to join their ridiculous sport and truly cherish the mess of flushed cheeks and exaggerated breathing.

My best to your man. He seems literally swallowed up in the drama as you script it. Is there truly any difference between you?

H.