Sometimes I’m so sad I feel like a freak. That sounds like self-pity unrestrained, he said. I thought about my language. Indeed he was right. Not only was it immoderate but it was imprecise. How do you compare sadness that takes over like an erupted volcano to sadness that stays inside one, still as a stillborn baby? People talk about grief coming and going like waves, but I am not a breakwater, I am not a boat, I am not a statue left on a rocky shore, tested for its endurance. Let me revise, I said. Sometimes sadness makes me unable to write.
