By the time I fully understood that I was too afraid to leave the house I was too afraid to get up off the sofa. Too focused on feeling my heart beat and being afraid it would stop. No doctor could find anything wrong with my heart but you have to admit it’s unnerving that the only thing keeping us alive is a single muscle, which must contract rhythmically and without pause every second for decades. Why doesn’t everyone just sit down, right now, wherever they are, and put two fingers to their wrists, just in case?
it’s the new moon and all the corpuscles
I think what saved me was knowing so many stories, because I could see how this one would end. Not with a heart attack–stories never end the way their characters expect them to. But with the ending common to all stories in which the characters refuse to move forward, away, or out. They shrink, dwindle, diminish, grow fainter, and eventually disappear, and so, inevitably, never, ever live happily ever after.
swallows skyward a controlled vocabulary
Red Dragonfly 