Excerpt: Manic Pixie Dream Girl

There are days when I wonder just how much of it was even real.
I wander from room to room of my current dwelling and I consider the matter. I consider thought, memory, perspective, the Rashomon effect; I consider dreams and reality, I regard Descartes... I'd think about other philosophers 'cept I haven't read enough to know.
When I think about it from that angle, I come to the conclusion that it can't have been real, that my mind, my brain, is entirely fallible, prone to flights of bizarre fantasy; that the whole adventure was made up in my head.
But then again...
Then again, I look at the vast hole in my finances, my pile of debts that I'm still working off; I observe the gifts, the trinkets from far-off lands and far flung reaches of the United States (the little frogs from Hawai'i the fine hat from Arizona). It's clear that I went somewhere, that a journey was taken; the where and how is entirely lucid.
The question is the why.
And then
And then
There is her.
Her, the problem of her, the problem of hair red like autumn, red like sunset, red like blood and copper, red like dreams, the problem of eyes like grass, like leaves, like acid, but not like emerald. Everyone says eyes like emerald for one thing, it's cliché; for another her eyes were far too alive to be emerald.
She's the problem of a laugh like water, of a walk like rain; the problem of a smile like lazy summer afternoons; the problem of an existence that supersedes and consumes your own, of a life that burns like fire and destroys all it touches.
Destroys, and uplifts, transforms, transubstantiates; a life that tempers and changes. A life that...
A life that still defines me, no matter how hard I try to escape.