But it has one enormous advantage over grief, which is that it never clouds the mind.

When your heart has gone completely numb, the tears and the pleading and the desperate hope are all gone, and what is left, in their place, is a terrible, useful clarity.

Absolute cruelty, and freezing cold logic.

And on that kitchen floor, in the dark, for the first time in five years, I had both.

I have wondered, since, whether I should be troubled by how much that numbness helped me, and I have decided that the honest answer is complicated.

The numbness was not a healthy thing.