The first picture added to this entry was taken tonight, April 6, on my return from work. The second, taken from my window, dates back to the damp evening before Iast.
They're not good pictures; I just used the camera in my 'phone, but I really don't have the heart to go down there with my Nikon, and I wanted these not for the quality but the memory.
It's time, here, to think of "turning the page", but before I do that, I simply want to express my heartfelt gratitude to everybody who has helped me to start doing so during the course of the past few days.
In any event, what I feel is nothing compared with what it must be like for Amine's family...
 It's been raining hard tonight against the wall where Amine died.
The rain has smudged the ink on some of the dozens of notes posted up since Saturday evening by many people who knew, loved and liked him and by others who didn't but were horrified by the taking of the boy's life.
Some people have left bouquets of flowers as well.
Every day when it's just been cloudy, each time I've walked past the corner, groups of people have been clustered round, reading the tributes to this 21-year-old.
When I went into one shop after work last night, several elderly ladies were discussing what they had heard about those appalling three minutes ... and, already, they were getting it so wrong that I quite rudely interrupted them, I couldn't help it.
One or two of the papers have added to the mess. To believe one account completely at odds with all the writing on the wall, Amine was a known villain ... and I, for that matter, was among seven witnesses arrested in the wake of the violence.
Like hell I was arrested!
Initially, there were four of us who voluntarily spent our evening at the Commissariat and indeed, I'd been one of those who shoved his way through the small crowd that gathered, to be right up among the police and firemen close to Amine when he died, quite ready for what had to follow.
Three others were arrested while I was giving evidence; that much I know because I was alone with the inspector in charge of the case and taking my statement when he ordered that they be "handcuffed if they show the slightest sign of trying to flee" and brought in.
 What I wasn't at all prepared for has been the maelstrom of emotions.
Everything is contradictions.
I've been almost sleepwalking through the day and unable to sleep at night, except on Sunday, when I had strange nightmares. My insides, of course, have gone haywire: the worst being the nausea that had me in its grip today from when I eventually woke up after getting to sleep a while before dawn until I kept down most of my lunch.
I badly need to talk to people (and to try at last to write this down), but I jump when the 'phone rings and any loud sounds are intolerable.
I've been ridiculously depressed and stupidly, almost hysterically, gay.
Even when I'm making jokes, I feel as if I'm on the edge of tears, but completely dry and empty of them.
I want to lose myself and any thoughts in all kinds of music and can only listen to Bach.
I'm falling in love with somebody -- the Wildcat will chastise me for revealing this against her advice, which I know to be sensible, just as she knew that I am almost before I did -- and desperately want to be with that person.
She's inspired me to think and write poetry in a way which I haven't felt for almost a decade, but the results have been so dire I keep on trashing it. Along with other things I've been writing.
Simply having her around not only makes me feel better but good, yet I want to leave her completely alone, because this is no state in which to fall in love with anybody.
I've wanted to be left alone myself and to be permanently at work, surrounded by other journalists, some of them far more experienced in such episodes than I am. Several have helped, but it was Patxi who instantly came to a point which mattered.
"Which is the hardest to cope with?" he asked. "The death or the violence?"
It's been the violence, so swift and so shocking. And yet still, often, I'm seeing Amine die, over and over, when I close my eyes. Especially after dark. I feel like an intruder, almost an invader, into the solitary privacy of his death, with nobody at hand who knew or loved him, the people he'd been with having fled the scene in moments...
I don't know why it's so much more ghastly this time than it's ever been before, but it is, and today I 'phoned the Apprentice Dragon, made an appointment with Dr Yang for after work tomorrow. At least he'll know what to do about the nausea and I know that a cocktail of self-medication is a very bad idea.
Tonight, I found many more of the things I've been feeling, or still am, in a list of "emotional symptoms" in adults compiled by Terry Larimore in 'Signs of Shock'.
Larimore distinguishes between shock and trauma in a way which has begun to make me feel better. She contributes greatly to my knowing perfectly well that "this too will pass".
I'm pretty well off, all told. Cyclothymic I certainly am and ultra-sensitive to those moon phases, but I've never had a full-blown depressive personality.
For those who do, though (and those who can't understand them), 'Wing of Madness' strikes me as an excellent addition to the very helpful websites I've come across and mentioned here in the past.
As for the person who killed Amine ... I simply want to ask "Why?"
12:30:07 AM link 
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