Is This the Start of the Breakdown?

What do I do? Other than learn to keep my mutherfucking mouth shut to my nearest and dearest?

Other than to do whatever I fucking want to, without guilt-- without feeling? Without concern for anyone but myself, assuming that's exactly what she is doing right now, since she won't just come out and say it?

What if I'm assuming the worst? Hasn't she given me every reason to be distrustful-- to suspect her? To be doubtful? To doubt her clarity, her sincerity?

Yes is the short answer. Yes. Completely and repetitively.

But then she comes around. And then, while riding BART, David Sylvian randomly comes on my jukebox. And a young father with his infant son, who looks uncannily like Orlando, sits in the seat in front of me, facing me all the way to Berkeley.

And then what do I do?

I spin like a multi-fused firework pinwheel, going round and round and round again. Burning hotter and hotter and hotter, until it's all gone and I'm just a burnt down armature. A blackened stick with other blackened sticks hanging off of me. A framework of energy expended, wasted.

And I have absolutely no idea what metaphor would describe her right now. Calculated enigma that she works, plots and, if driven to, fights to remain.

Is that it? Am I defying her very nature with my crab-like poking and prodding? Am I attacking, in her mind?

Prying open the shell on the unfinished pearl? Pulling back the shower curtain on a truly private moment? Grating her bare exposed flesh with my unrelenting insensitivity?

Maybe she just doesn't have it in her to be anyway but how she is right now.

What then?

What now?