This much I'm certain of. It doesn't happen immediately. You'll finish and that will be that until a moment will come. Maybe in a month, maybe any year, maybe even several years. You'll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won't matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace. You'll suddenly realize things are not how you perceive them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you. More importantly, shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how you'll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place. On the shelters, television, magazines, movies, won't protect you anymore. You might try scribbling in a journal on an appkin, maybe even in the margins of books. That's when you'll discover you no longer trust the very walls you always took for granted. Even the hallways you've walked a hundred times will feel longer, much longer, and the shadows, any shadow at all, will suddenly seem deeper, much, much deeper. You might try then, as I did, to find the sky so full of stars that will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light. That will no longer trace constellations. You'll care only about the darkness, and you'll wander it for hours, for days, maybe even for years. Trying and vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable universe appointed Sentinel. As if just by looking, you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad, you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep. Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant, or on some desolate street, or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity in truce, tearing apart piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived niles, whether deliberate or on contrast. And then, for better or worse, you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist, you still will. Fighting with everything you've got, not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what is will be, what has always come before. The creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name. And then the nightmares will begin.