And..

And then I realized that something had gone wrong in the last few days, something had gone wrong in my relationship to the Mexican poets or with the new women in my life, but no matter how much I thought about it I couldn´t figure out what the problem was, the abyss that opened up behind me if I looked over my shoulder. All the same, it didn´t frighten me. It was an abyss without monsters, holding only darkness, silence and emptiness, three extremes that caused me pain, lesser pain, true, a flutter in the stomach, but a pain that sometimes felt like fear.

Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives