I do not recollect much of the two weeks I had prescribed for our separation from one another.
I faintly remember, during fits of insomnia and emotional turmoil, turning to my manuscript, "Don Juan Triumphant"- a lurid opera that would surely take my last breath with the echo of its final chord-. Thoughts and decisions, even bouts of consciousness, had invited themselves to join in my miserable mind, which had always served as the shelter for two exclusive, if unwelcome, guests. Bitterness and Loneliness. I did not need these bothersome new visitors. Of course, I had also cursed the previous strangers, Love and Desire, when they had first made my acquaintance in the delicate form of one Mademoiselle Christine Daae. The strangers settled in, nonetheless, making themselves quite comfortable- always stoking a fire in the home of my soul. Gifts from Christine, though she was unaware of her torturous generosity, that would never leave me. Instead, they began to influence my every thought and action.
Love was the most cunning manipulator- causing its victim to willingly and eagerly fulfill its every desire. Love was also my tutor. Yes, imagine! When I had never in the bleak entirety of my earthly existence been the student to any master! This emotion, which I had always dismissed as juvenile and intrusive, now ruled my very pulse! I was both enraged and elated by this domination.
Why? Because, for the first time in my life, I realized, there was more to me than mottled flesh. I was alive. Christine Daae, ignorant of her powers, had accomplished what only one other being in the history of the endless universe had done. She'd resurrected a dead soul, called Lazarus from his cavernous tomb with her golden voice. Though God himself chose to abandon me to my own reality of morphine illusions and self-loathing, she had not. A girl, as alone and adrift in the world as a fallen leaf, had forced me to recognize my humanity. That, no matter how brilliant and hideous a being I was, despite how fiercely I held to my beloved solitude- I was only a man. A conflicted man-even a deformed beast- but a human being, yet. Christine had caused me to burn.
Yes, darling girl! You carved a home for your image out of that dense blackness of my soul. If only you realized that you had unsealed something more dangerous than Pandora's Box. What would you say, Christine? Would you weep? What would you do, in your innocent fragility, my dear, if you realized that you had opened the coffin of my heart?