April 27, 2019:

I didn't think it was possible to experience that much pain and survive.

There was a moment in the hotel when I looked down on myself from a perspective near the ceiling, thinking, He can't feel that much pain and live. "He" was on the floor with his back to the couch, legs flat in front of him, head back, mouth lifted to the ceiling, screaming. Like a burn victim just before the end arrives, or a person who's been flayed by Ramsay Bolton, where death isn't so much welcomed as acknowledged as inevitable.

I didn't survive. I shattered, like a windowpane struck by the butt of a gun, divided by cracks into quadrants of living despair. For weeks my field of vision displayed reality broken into parcels, dis-integrated, always fragments, never a homogeneous whole.

If I slept at all it was for thirty minutes or ninety minutes in twenty-four hours, and after waking abruptly I'd sit bolt upright and weep, nearly always until dawn.

I went to work in this state. In libraries, as a temp, where reading was the only employable skill I possessed. No-one knew. A co-worker asked me one day not to be so damn cheerful. "I'm not in a good mood," she said. Although I was incapable of laughter I found that hilarious.