The First 48

What do you do when your guiding light is snuffed out? How do you carry on when the doors of grace and wisdom have been shut to you? These are just a few of the questions you ask yourself when you find that Wasp101 has erected a wall and left you on the other side.

And while I've managed to take a bit of nourishment, my world has grown very dark indeed. As the title of this post suggests, the first 48 hours are something of a defining period in the AW101 period that mark, one can only hope, the steepest and most sudden decline. It's only after these few hectic days and nights pass that one can really step back and appraise the various ways in which life has changed.

The most striking is the overall feeling of frailty. It's as though you're trying in vain to shrug off lingering illness. Your muscles and bones all work in concert to disobey your every attempt to move responding with aches and pains that are, in turns, dull and throbbing as well as stingingly sharp. As yet there seems to be no respite to this condition as the atrophy progresses with a cruel indifference that straps me, like Gulliver, to my fainting couch.

The other great loss, as one might expect, is the loss of appetite. I genuinely feel for Higgins, as he's tried every conceivable garnish trying to tempt my gusto from out of the rushes. Yet his fragrant preparations fall as folly upon the mahogany banquet table.

I don't know where the path will lead, dear friends. Perhaps it will wind for a period then straighten out. Perhaps it will lead only to a small clearing where it ends in wavering shafts of light. All I know is that this diary will serve as the markers on my journey and I shan't let my quill run dry. Good luck and godspeed to all those who find themselves wandering this lonely path themselves.