And after, no one will really ever remember it. Like the greatest crimes, it will be as if it never happened. The suffering, the deaths, the sorrow, the abject, pathetic pointlessness of such immense suffering by so many; maybe it all exists only within these pages and the pages of a few other books. Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is. And while it reigns, it is as if there is nothing in the universe that it is not. ~ from The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan.

For breakfast, I had blueberry crisp that I made last night. And nobody died or even cried. That's enough. If I were Virginia Woolf, I could write that properly.  The woman would stand in her kitchen feeling keenly that she is not suffering, feeling it so fiercely that it would double her over except that the lack of suffering's beauty is that it is not a punch to the gut, wishing for the world to stop and value toast properly, thinking that at many times and in many places a woman can make herself toast any time she wants it. She knows how to bake and crisp and butter if only for the grain and safety that are required for the task, and that wherever there is a smell of crisp there must also be flour, and safety, enough. And what a wonder that is, enough to cry over anyplace and any time a woman cannot have it, which is also common, she knows, and that at this very moment that she is rubbing crisp into the roof of her mouth with her tongue, another woman is somewhere without grain or too full of grief to swallow, and for that woman she cries as she stands in her warm kitchen looking at the frozen pond through the laced window, praying nonsensically please and thank you at god knows what, swallowing blueberries and a mouth full of teary spit.

for my father/the throbbing in my head