13 December.

Dear Herr Stiefel,

Moritz, it has been nearly a week since I last wrote to you. Mama says I should be writing more frequently, but I believe that once weekly is more than adequate. After all, you wouldn't care, anyway. You're dead. It's not like you could rise from your burial plot just to chastise me for not sending you letters on a consistent schedule.

Mama keeps telling me that you're safe and well cared for in heaven with Abraham and Azrael, but as you know, I vehemently digress. If I am honest, I haven't much believed in God or heaven since the revelation that came with reading Goethe's Faust. It quite seems as though I've made a deal with Mephistopheles, myself, with all that I have suffered since my "encounters" with Wendla Bergman. I will keep my end of the treatise and sign our pact in blood, and he will work his otherworldly magic and somehow save me from this hellscape I seem to be living through.

I returned to school this Monday, simply to get out of the house. I could not stand one more day under the watchful gaze of Mama, who would come to check on me once two hours had passed on the clock, never missing a chance to ask after the welfare of her "precious child." So, tired of that, I proceeded on to my first day back at school. Yes, it was just as infuriating as ever. Herr Sonnenstich is now making us read Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the subject matter is nothing but bland and unbelievably dull. The Pathos of Love, while it sounds intriguing, is not, in any sense. Oh, Moritz, I do wish you were still here to bear these burdens with me. Dare I say it, I miss having you by my side during lecture; you certainly kept things entertaining. However, I know fully well that you cannot come to my aid, anymore.

Goodbye, my friend.

Regards,

Melchior Gabor