Dear diary,

For hours I have been lying here staring at the ceiling of the cheap motel. 

Again and again I have dialed my girlfriend's number, only never to complete the call. Who would believe me? In the end, they would take me to a clinic. Declare me insane. I would do it myself, after all. 

What choice did I have? 

 Go back and just accept it? Pretend it's normal to see ghosts? Pretend the ghost wasn't there? Tell him to scurry back into the painting? Book a parapsychologist off the internet? Ask my occult mail order neighbor? 

I know it's completely irrational, not to use the word crazy again, but when I think of my neighbor, a shiver comes over me that I can't explain. Ever since he moved in a week ago, whenever we run into each other, it gives me the creeps. The sign on his mailbox indicating his occult trade doesn't make it any more sympathetic. Until a few days ago, I would have laughed at anyone who told me about ghosts. 

I never believed in anything like supernatural , aliens or curses. Slowly I am not sure anymore. What if all this is not imagination? 

Again I stare at the stained ceiling in search of meaning. 

I long for him. I know how crazy (there's that word again I'm trying to avoid) that sounds.

 I am probably actually losing my mind. 

How can I crave something that my brain alone has thought up.  If it is not real, then it must be a creation of my mind. I would understand that I am so lonely that I subconsciously fantasize a supposedly perfect man from a painting. 

Lonely people did many strange things and threw their logical thinking overboard. Otherwise, all those emails with African princes wouldn't be so successful. 

But at what point did my brain start spinning mirages? Was my apartment a sauna as the handyman claimed? Was I imagining the knocking and the stench?  Were these all fantasies of my desperate mind? 

But why should I do this to myself? The spots on the ceiling blur into a whole single gray-brown something before my eyes. 

In this room it is warm, almost clean, it smells of scented spray of the note pine and there is a gentle silence. Yet neither sleep nor rest finds me. 

My thoughts circle wildly, hectically, without pattern become more and more confused fragments. Suddenly nothing is as it seems. 

I don't even trust myself anymore.... and that's where I fail.