It reminds me of Saratoga Springs, a place I once went thinking it would be a bourgeois hippie spa with aromatherapy candles and womb-like treatment rooms, but instead felt like an insane asylum where you’d go to get electric shock – teal and white cinderblock walls, porcelain-enamelled tubs, brisk employees.

am trying to be loved.

We are driving along East Blithedale in the dark in a van, Grandpa at the wheel. He is silhouetted, and we know we are in trouble. We are en route to the scene of the crime, but what crime?

When I stand in mountain pose, I no longer feel a connection to the mothership.

I really tried, but the truth is that I couldn’t feel the pauses between contractions – maybe because I was too disoriented by the pain each one left in its wake, and too fearful of the one I knew was coming. The moment for the lesson is now.

I feel like, if my listener really understood the gravity, Plath’s fate might be altered. I tell E about it at their birthday dinner and I can tell I’m not capturing their attention, probably due to the din of the restaurant, plus some Boston class and sexuality shit that would totally make sense but which I am also probably projecting. It makes me

think, It’s 2022, how can they just abduct me off the street and make me undergo this torture, and abandon my son in this crowd? Then I think, it’s 2022, so that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

from inestimable sorrow at all she has lost, to the recognition that it is within her power to offer the world at least some of what C offered us – the presence, the rigour, the holding. As J says this I realise that a similar feeling has been growing inside me as well, no words, just a little bulge of light nudging out.

Now that I’ve written all this down, I dreamt I was in a room with pink walls and an Equus poster doesn’t sound so random. It sounds like an invagination – a chamber to hold the pastiche of lacerations.