He wanted to tell her he did not want to cry again. He did not.

The Aftermath

What Emily Dickinson did not mention when she wrote 'After great pain a formal feeling comes':  the struggle between stubbornness to maintain formality and the willingness to yield is just as painful.

Broken Promises & Disturbed Sleep

He wanted to announce that falling out of sleep at 3.30 AM was not waking up. That the broken promise of sleep still had a redemptive possibility. Waking up was reserved for 6 AM, when staring into the unforgiving empty day did not have the promise of a hiding place. 

Blending

Define it, he'd say. He tried. But that's merely solitude with an extended frame of reference, he'd point out.

Then it actually struck him. Down. The definition did. In solitude, the feedback of one's own definition still reiterates oneself. The absence of that last loop is what makes it isolation. 

Darkness is at least amorphous, he thought.

Aging emptiness

She wasn't the type to be moved by the depth of his torment. He was embarrassed. That had stopped moving anybody, let alone her. He wanted to ask her why. He did not.

Elsewhere she said, of course it's not Utopian if the goal of your life is to have your children grow up and claim to have been raised by a depressive.

Office

What do you mean you want a wider group?

Just to make sure we aren't too dependent on you.

And the wider group will help in that because?

Don't be antagonistic.

Okay, let me rephrase. Why do you assume inference approaches work better for power equations and not for the actual inference engine that's being built? 

What?

You just defeated your own argument.

Wish it on no one

Coming from anyone else, this would have sounded pretentious. Not Walser,

I would wish it on no one to be me.

Only I am capable of bearing myself.

To know so much, to have seen so much, and

To say nothing, just about nothing.