I believe in dragons. I fear that all other words will fall short, but if you desire them nonetheless, this:

It is clear and silent, this bone-cold December night, down in the New Haven yards. I walk in a trance, borne down by the dull nightmare of reality. I put one foot in front of the other. I stop. The chill creeps to the skin at my cuffs and collar, my fingertips stick to the camera's metal knobs. I adjust the camera without notice, without thought; my eyes examine the details of equipment, of scene, but my vision is not in this place.

Again and again she falls, a small, beautiful woman, towards her own destruction, twisting, arms flailing, from a room I left, twenty minutes and twenty miles before. Three stories from the ledge to the rough grey stone of the courtyard; if she has dropped herself from the ledge she has ceased to exist, so much of my own reason for living, smashed down on the granite, cracked skull all liquified nervous tissue and pooling blood.

And she has sent me away.

I think you have to feel it yourself, cold and lonely this December midnight. Nobody is waiting for me except, perhaps, that beautiful, brilliant fool at the edge of her window; I have a home to go to, sixty miles more, but no one waits, no one worries; my parents are silent in their beds. They have come to despair of me, these winter nights, when I dive into the murky, incandescent waters of madness, of self-harm; these nights of overwhelming selflessness, of death in life. I could go back to the courtyard, to the window, to the bed where in brighter, warmer times we've made love, but the window tortures me; until the morning breaks I will not return to that place.

It's a cold and lonely night out there in the inner darkness; if it creeps on through my flesh I might be persuaded to go for the window myself, nights like this. With each evening as it sets, blackness encroaching over the Connecticut hills, I am less capable of self-conception. Bereft of will, bereft of identity, I see myself only a facet of her need.

There is no beauty in this world, only its dark, mocking reflection.

It's a cold and lonely night. A cold and lonely angst. A cold and lonely dependence, a cold and lonely stereotype, a cold and lonely angst stereotype angst --- cold and lonely, empty --

I am standing in a railyard, in terror, in wonder, alive.

the ear-shattering cry of the train's horn outraged as the salt-stained aluminum body is suddenly six inches from mine in an ecstasy of rumbling

a halo of sparks as the pantographs scrape through ice on the wire

For these hours I will force the burning cold air in and out of my lungs; each breath is to be savored, each icy stab of wind on my bare ears. Dribblets of snot frozen on my upper lip, a small rip in the nylon at my cuff as I adjust the bellows and shutter. As I grasp the timer bulb: twenty blessed, church-still minutes of unroiled air.

It is as if the elements were rendered flexible to my will.

It is essential to maintain a certain number of fundamentally non-rational beliefs. By this effort one chooses a side in the struggle between Romance and the mechanistic MTV/interstate highway/skyscraper/pop art Unsoul.

I choose dragons.

I choose William Byrd, Thomas Tallis, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.

I choose stillness. I choose the silent beauty of an endless railroad track.

I think you have to feel it yourself.