Oh, the vapors! They have seized me whole! I am undone, utterly undone, a vessel of sorrow dashed upon the rocks of despair. My heart, my poor, weak heart, is aflutter with such a terrible palpitation that I fear it shall burst from its very confines.
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I cannot breathe, I tell you, I cannot! A great weight, a leaden, crushing burden, has settled upon my breast, such as a great black hound might lay upon a soul already tormented. The world spins, or perhaps it is my head that plays these dreadful tricks. The room, with its damnable wallpaper, seems to swim before my eyes, the pattern shifting and moving as if possessed by some malevolent spirit.
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My hands, see how they tremble! They are useless, quite useless, capable of nothing save wringing themselves in this agony. Tears flow, not as a gentle shower, but as a torrent, a veritable flood that threatens to drown me in my own distress. The very air is thick with my lamentations, and I can hear nothing above the sound of my own wretchedness, save for a ringing in my ears, a high, thin keen that speaks of a mind unraveling.
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I am naught but a bundle of nerves, a-jangle and overwrought. This affliction, this hysteria, has made a prisoner of my own body. I am weak, I am faint, I am lost! Oh, the crying, the endless, racking crying! It tears at my throat, leaving me breathless and desperate. I feel as though I am falling, tumbling down into a bottomless pit of blackest despair, devoid of all hope and light.
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They say I must be calm, that I must take to my bed and rest my delicate constitution. But how can I rest when my very soul is in such turmoil? The injustice of it all! My faculties are frailer than I knew, and this grief, this monumental grief, has undone me for all time.
