This Night's A Perfect Shade Of Dark Blue

People fill my daytimes, and their presence even stretches long into the night as hours are whiled away under the stars.

The reason I usually get antsy by a certain time is not because I'm strangely neurotic and afflicted with a Cinderella Disorder, as I'd previously supposed. I've just found no replacement to retire to at night, and the hope that something that I need will be waiting for me when I return to my chamber wraps itself so tightly round my throat that I can hardly keep from choking at times.

Hope shouldn't do that, I know -- it's the near-certainty of disappointment that does it. It is the broken faith and the scattered wishing and that small, small sliver of an echoing word: devoted.

And when I no longer need that, then I will be free. But for now, I need it. And of all the bitter ironies I have swallowed like foul tonics, this, THIS, is the most treacherous. I showed what devotion can be and should be, and I paid such a price to show that. I feel I deserve something in return, at least once in a while.

But no, still, the empty descent to a half-sleep that I must trick myself into and the whispered...what.