Beatrice

I sat up in bed, still wearing my everyday shirt; my clothes and shoes lay strewn round about on the the floor and reeked of tobacco and vomit, and between fits of headache, nausea and a raging thirst a picture rose before me such as I had long ago ceased to look at. I saw my home, father and mother and sisters and the garden. I saw my quiet, familiar bedroom. I saw school and the marketplace, Demian and the confirmation classes--everything about it was light, i had an aura of brightness; it was all wonderful, righteous and pure. And everything as is now realized, that had been mine only yesterday, nay a few hours before and was mine for the asking, had at this very hour, this very moment, ceased to belong to me, depraved and cursed as I was, ceased to belong to me, rejected me, regarded me with disgust. Every act of affection and intimacy which I had experienced in the distant, golden gardens of childhood, every kiss from my mother, every Christmas feast, every bright summer morning at home, every flower in the garden was blighted; I had trampled them under foot. If informers hd come and tied me up and led me to the gallows as an outcast an a defiler of the temples, I would have been ready and gone willingly and considered it just and rightful.