vernacular,

Death is confronting for sheltered people because it fractures realities.

repressed

who’s laughing in the sunlight with my brothers, and if I could freeze-frame this moment, take out all the context and the subtext, it would nearly be perfect—but context and subtext is everything.

subdued

“Proxemics!”

I wouldn’t realize for years how heavy that weighed on me, but it did. It does still, I suppose.

But that’s not how pain works… You ignore it and it just sinks down deeper. It lodges itself in the corners of our memories, hangs off tree branches on Callawassie Drive. It hides under the pews in the back row of the church. It gets caught in a pile of sheets no one knew what to do with.

proxemics