Pause.

The world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside of her. But there was no release. Table, ivory, elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, mollusk, Shabbos, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doily...None of it moved her. She addressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say, I don't love you. Bark-brown fence post: I don't love you. Poem too long: I don't love you. Lunch in a bowl: I don't love you. Physics, the idea of you, the laws of you: I don't love you. Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was. Everything was just a thing, mired completely in its thingness." Jonathan Safron Foer

My hands are dry and cracked, a web of blue veins to match my tangled mass of thoughts. My room is a mess of boxes and old birthday cards and dead flowers, and my skin is pallid, smells of salt and fabric softener. I clutch the grass between my fingers, for fear of falling upward upward into one of those distant flecks of light, to be forever lost. Is it so good to be alive? Alive, clinging to the things that tie us down on the earth. In the idle moments of conversation, do the words pull us back down to earth? An exhale between syllables, silence begins to carry us further and further away. Would it be so bad a thing? If everyone was silent so we all would begin slowly to drift above the earth forever deeper into the sky. A human engine of sorts, not propelled by oil or water, but by silence