because I was trying and failing each time to think that I wasn’t losing my grip when I knew damn well that I was just desperately holding on to mere slivers of reality and feeling them slip from me, and feeling ecstatic each time they did, because I loved that he was seeing this happen to me, and I wanted him to see this on my face even while he was doing the most generous thing in the world, which was to wait and still wait while I kept repeating he wasn’t hurting me, wasn’t hurting me,
