these words get deleted and rewritten and over and over. they get said in my head on the metro, reconfigured while walking home, recontextualized, reshapen, regarded.

i am trying to remember anger and the last time i felt this consumed and clouded by it. i am trying to remember if this exact set of feelings has come over me before and then left me-- feeling fairly normal and alert. i want to know more about my previous recoveries, but i am having trouble with that data.

it is so hard to keep memory of such bad feelings, and yet I strive to maintain some sort of consistency or connection with my emotional past. it's the only information that provides for me. the only set of clues.

my anger frightens me and also keeps me standing.

after one week, the collective cowardice and resentment and drama blooms and overtakes this landscape.

i hate feeling like plath, reminding myself of plath, being embarrassed at the thought of myself behaving as i'd imagine she'd be behaving in a similar situation. my humiliation hinges on my lack of possible solutions or escape routes.

i am here, in washington, d.c. in the city you invited me into, in the daily life we carefully arranged. i am here for the choices i made and stood by- the many compromises i kept.

i pick up the novel i am reading. it falls open to the page where this passage is printed:

"[there is] some kind of hideous central ice where his heart's nodes of empathy and basic other-directedness ought to be, and is increasingly tormented by shame and self-doubt, and then is doubly ashamed and worried about the fact that the shame and self-doubt are themselves so self-involving..." -David Foster Wallace

i hate you so much for all of this.