Dear Yuki,

What finally had a calming effect on my thoughts was stepping into the air-conditioned subway car. My mind grew less agitated, my skin breathed open and free and the sweat on my forehead began to dry. So I thought things over. As I'm always doing, only this thinking was free from the heart's meddling. It happened up in my head only. With strange clarity what unexpectedly arose was the weekend immediately after our split. Individual events that until now have remained obscure behind curtains of grief and anxiety were revealed. I saw my movements, my actions. When clarity arrives like this it is always to find reality indisposed, stripped down to its three humble dimensions. Things the way the are or were, deflated, de-mythologized. I smiled. So that's what I looked like, so that's how I acted! In effect like a clown, performing contortions of body and soul, behaving like an ass, weeping, grabbing for attention, discarding all higher thought to make room for an animal ritual of humiliation. But I can't see, even now in this moment of cool-air clarity and reprieve of mental disorder, how I might have acted differently. Nor can I say that I won't devolve into the same antics should the same thing happen again. (Though I do feel, after us, a net loss of my capacity to be so vulnerable, so engaged.) The heart learns at its own pace, if at all, and better it should be caged and protected as it is because it can't seem to take care of itself.

The memory of that weekend must have been lurking, so quickly did it show up unannounced the moment mental chaos abated. And so strong was my embarrassment at seeing myself from this perspective that I glanced sheepishly at the other passengers crowded around me as if they too were remembering my shame.

A humid day and the gripes, the grievances surface like sweat on the skin of my soul. I am in a foul mood. (more)...