I am beginning to question the usefulness of you oh journal of mine.
Night after night I open you up, put ink to pen. And I sit. My mind a muddle of conflicting thoughts as always it is. Never is it simple. How I long for clarity. Instead, I sit here conducting fully fledged debates inside my head as I have so often in this book. Contradictory as my conclusions can be from one minute to the next.
I concern myself with the mundane matters of running a business, The Inn has proved prosperous even if there have been some hiccups along the way. I still need to arrange the employment of another waitress and there is also the matter of further publicity to attract patrons from outside the village. But I have been unable to focus as of late.
At the foot of the Captain's grave, she came to me. There sometimes I go, in the grounds of the Dawnhall. To share a drink with my old friend, seems we've shared a lot of things nowadays. The Captain and I.
How she confounds me. I cannot find a single reason to turn her away nor do I wish to and that is what frightens me.
By a lake we gazed up at the stars and I am haunted by familiarity. A ghost of the past come to remind me that this happiness of mine is merely but an illusion. An enjoyable one but an illusion nonetheless. I had thought the loss of 'my flower' was to be my final torment that the fates could do no further cruelty to me they had not already inflicted.
The young son of hers. Why, he must be the same age now as my only daughter if but a year younger. Clutching his little wooden sword as he did reminded me so much of my younger brother also. A boy of eight now would you believe it. I do often wonder how he is. Were it not for my own inadequacy I would know.
I have bore much of my soul to this woman, she of boyhood dreams. Not all intentionally. The woman does not know of her beauty. I observed it myself by starlight. Oh, she is a rare prize and I am a sentimental fool. My prattling as ever trumps my reason.
Idealise this woman not, says another voice. Favour not your chances, learn the lessons of the past.
A cursed man is a lonely man though I do oft ponder the reasons for my curse. Sins of my father, perhaps. The blood on his hands. On my hands. They took everything away from me. My friends, few as they were. My family.
Yet I feel so close, so comfortable with this woman. A fine card player would I make supposedly but ever more my desire seems to lean toward exposing and playing my hand.
But everything in my gut tells me I am again making a very grave mistake and for one you assume she feels even remotely the same way. As I think of lovers gone and past does she not also think of the Gondorian knight? I cannot be so sure of the woman's intent. It has been unclear at times.
You truly do not help me anymore. No matter how much ink crosses your pages, my thoughts are no clearer now than when I began. Have they ever been clear.
I have oft pictured a time preceding all of this death, and decay. The years I spent in captivity. The betrayals. The crushing loneliness. I dare to think sometimes of an escape from my prison. From the whims of the spinners as they weave my life's thread. Hope is the most frightening affliction imaginable and in the past so much of my pain could have been alleviated had I not had the hope for a better outcome. A better outcome that could never be.
We spoke at length, of the many women, most of whom I cannot remember their faces. I confess my crimes and she flinches not from them.
Even as I write past deeds come back to me, past deeds that have slipped my mind. The murder of her patron for his defiling of the Rat. The one secret I cannot bring myself to part with. The whore's step-father, whom I mentioned. That I should have allowed the monster in my employ to have taken one of the Captain's daughters even though I did not know it at the time and thus be responsible for her subsequent descent into forced prostitution. Even if the blame only rests upon my shoulders partially. Bringing her to the Dawnhall was not enough to atone for that. Nor killing the monster when he had outlived his usefulness.
I conspired to kill a friend's lover even as I insisted to her face that I meant them well. Yes, he may have been a torturer and a poisoner and I was doing her a favour though she would never have accepted my logic.
The murder of the halfwit who worked under the chief barmaid in the Pony for being witness to one of my crimes, oh they were bleating about that one for days. I stood among them feigning shock and sympathetic looks as the Watch ran their investigations.
I killed a girl in my cellar not long ago, her only crime was that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, witness to the demons within my soul. Innocent.
She would flinch from those revelations, my dear friend. Surely.
I will abandon my search for clarity at this hour, I am not alone this night. Confusion wins the day.
