The Standing She Did Not Know She Had

It was an architecture, and I had been living inside it, decorating a nursery in one of its rooms, for months.

And here is the strange thing that architecture did to me, once I could finally see the whole of it.

It did not break me the way a single sudden blow might have.

It steadied me.

Because a moment of passion you cannot fight; there is nothing to take hold of.

But an arrangement — a plan, a structure, a thing built deliberately by people who thought themselves clever — an arrangement has seams.

It has parts.