The month of October/6

For many nights I have stayed awake trying to understand what happened to me on that evening and I ask myself how comes I failed in the one test of my manhood that i needed so much to pass.

I grope for the excuses, which i can use to justify my weakness or which can explain away the fact that i have now ruined my chances with her. And i try to tell myself that we were not meant to be together...and even then the shame lingers and the ache in my heart refuses to go away.

I have tried to push the memory of that day out of my mind and i have tried to believe that I am moving on from her but she continues to haunt me like the ghost of a person whom i must have violated; I wake up in the middle of the nights with her image so strong in my mind but then I also feel the same hardness in my loins and notice the same drops of shame...soiling me.

I can no longer think of Adelaide now with that same purity that had once made me to believe that the love of her is the key to my redemption from the guilt that was birthed at that moment of my transgression with Betty. When i think of her now, I remember the image of her soft body that had rubbed so intimately against my hardness-and the the way in which the last drops of my pride had drained away on that night...

My dreams of her have also become corrupted; I always see her through thick clouds of smoke in the poorly lit hall of a brothel where there is no smile on her lips or joy in her eyes when she looks at me. And I see her always beckoning me to follow her as she moves towards the familiar doors, which leads to the squalid little room where i had become a man in the arms of Betty, the prostitute.

I now feel bereft of the innocence to truly love a woman; i feel bereft of the inspiration to want to become a better man...I feel so very lost.