It’s a kind of sneaky narcotic, one produced by thoughts and words and refined by time. It doesn’t fix anything. It just numbs and reassures, until it can consume the desperate for the sake of its own brilliant incandescence. And as hope comforts us, it becomes easier and easier to forget that it too was in the jar that Pandora carried. It’s the one horror of the world that wasn’t loosed when she opened the lid. It’s the one horror that lives in us.

