David has a dream where he is walking on a frozen lake. His friends and his family are there too, but all of them are at a slight distance. When the ice begins to crack beneath him it seems their attention has been drawn by something on the horizon, something David cannot see. When he looks down and sees the ice breaking, and when it gives way completely and he plummets into the cold water, not one of the people around him seems to notice at first. Shock envelops him, the water stings his flesh and the temperature cuts to his marrow. His vision dims, and the cold begins to blot out his consciousness.
        “You never want to do anything any more,” David’s girlfriend tells him. She has said this before, and he knows it’s true. He can’t think of a single thing he has wanted to do for the past six months, since his father’s funeral. He wakes up, he goes to work, he comes home, he goes to sleep. He feels no desire for anything, he is pleased by nothing, he feels nothing. Each hour of each day passes like this, like he is viewing life from a vast remove. “You used to have so many ideas for us,” Carrie says, and she is right again. When they first started seeing each other he had all kinds of ideas. They both called in sick to work one Friday and took the Eurostar to Paris on a whim, they attended salsa lessons, he painted her portrait in oils, they got up on stage at an open mic night and performed a terrible version of Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ with him on guitar and her on vocals. He wrote her poetry and spoke often about the future. They planned their marriage, they named their unborn children.
         “I want you to talk to me – I’m here for you, you can talk to me. You used to talk to me.” Carrie says she wants to talk even as she’s packing her things and leaving, and she’s asking him, holding her left hand softly in his, to talk to her, and tell her he wants her and that she shouldn’t leave. He tells her these things – well, he produces these words – but it just makes her cry and she leaves anyway. He sits down on the steps and waits to see what will happen next, but her departure is like an explosion without any sound, like a distant star turning nova – he can see it is tremendously powerful, but it seems so far away that it may as well not have happened at all.
        David has a dream where he is drowning in ice water. His friends and his family are around, but they can do nothing to help. As the ice cracks and breaks up, the circle of water around him grows larger, and the people with him are pushed further and further back. Shock envelops him but, soon after, the numbness comforts him. After less than a minute in the water he no longer feels the cold, and the extreme temperature has taken from him his speech and most of his brain functions. He begins to feel comfortable where he is, and the initial panic disappears, so as his head dips beneath the surface and the water steals into his lungs he doesn’t fight it. It is dark beneath the water, like a heavy curtain drawn over a sunlit room. For the first time in six months, David finds something he wants.