“For a long time I stopped crying; then I started again.”

This is a sentence I have written many times.

Trying to understand the stopping, trying to make sense of the restart.

It has to do with unbearableness, and delusion. It has to do with shutting down aliveness toward an idea of self-preservation.  

To be a dead woman walking around is preferable, or not preferable really, but appears to be the only viable option to staying alive.

Then I read a book about crying. It was not my experience. I had to try again.

I was confident I could do it. I had utter trust in my body’s knowledge. So when I cracked and tore and bled and blacked out, I came to. Got sewn up. Etcetera. I think this is what happened, but I am not sure. Exhaustion furrowed me. Fever laid me on the floor. I woodened. Wouldn’t not.

Here’s another example: One quasi-normal day, extra green, negative cloudy, I used my thumb, pushed a bean through earth’s upheaval. The pills in the cabinet, asleep behind the vinegar, itself behind the mirror. There was not a cliff from which to walk off as far as the eye could see.

I read orbiting as or biting and upon rereading wasn’t sure if I read it or read it just as I suddenly heard bees being and being as being what a bee does. Duh.

I began to feel sympathy for the women in their parked cars on their phones the rest stops all full up of them the parking lots packed with them no one not anyone looking at a sunset.