it had been years, decades,

 She wasn’t a great reader. It took her ages to get through a page,

and though her son had suggested audiobooks, she found them

tiresome and dull.

Drinking used to

make her feel like she was more than just the cavernous gut of a

starving jackal, but it had been years, decades, since it had made

her feel anything like good

It was nice,

so nice that Julius closed her eyes and found herself in the elated,

dreamy state she’d occasionally felt at church as a little girl when

the choir performed. A kind of feeling like God was real, and so

was Heaven, and so were things like purpose, meaning, beauty,

connection.

But the song was over after about five minutes, and one couldn’t

go on listening to music that made you feel like that forever, and

worse, even if you found music that made you feel like that, it wouldn’t

always make you feel like that. Everything had its life span.

...

Via social media, she knew words and phrases like gaslighting,

trauma-informed, disorganized attachment, kink-friendly, pinkwashing, and could use them all in a sentence.