I don't know how long I kept at it...
I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still.
It didn't seem to be summer any more

...it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.

The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.

That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses.
"Save them for my funeral," I'd said.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.