The Underside of the Top Bunk.

Why can I never go to sleep on nights I need rest the most? Why do I run back to the same emails and thoughts and hurts? I coolly listen to each word with the care and precision of a forensic pathologist with something to prove, examining each piece of evidence surrounding a body cold and dead.

I am thinking and fretting and feeling my heart rate rise then fall like disturbed bathwater lapping over then dipping under every naked and thus keenly sensitive inch of my increasingly wrinkled skin. The sound of the dripping faucet as well as the generally uncomfortable feeling of accordion-folding myself into this bathtub recede as attention instead reroutes to replaying the same words I've run over before.

Surely somewhere in there resides a clue to why things went the way they did or how her gentle or resigned attempts at consolation became choreographed or rehearsed or simply grotesque parodies of the same phrases muttered sweetly months before.

Returning to her voice not only was a constant source of peace when she spoke of love and future but was also nearly all there is left to overanalyze after that lightheaded purge of love letters and notes and drawings prepared in lieu of listening to Bible lessons then passed with a bold subtlety that betrayed no wrongdoing. Those scraps of paper that once were worth days of glances from strangers passing by to offer only imaginative leaps of ego-stroking now are torn and discarded.

"Nearly" because my inbox is still littered with tiny missives in foreign languages and tender perfect repetitions with almost embarrassing candor. These emails are no more or less poignant than any love-drenched ink-stain but obviously offer nothing in the way of catharsis when to obliterate them means mere mouse clicks which now for the first time ever are not obnoxious, not loud enough, loud enough for the significance of freeing oneself of digital chains from a love cold and dead.

(I wrote this when very tired and deliriously lucid and after reading David Foster Wallace and wanted to try run-on sentences and many many conjunctions but I don't think footnotes are possible on a blog and even if they were they certainly aren't feasible. I think most would agree with that sentiment.)