If I do not force myself to feel, then soon the world will be as dead to me as I am to it. So I am in the enviable position of driving myself like a lashed horse into dead-end ravines of resentment and loss and uselessness.

But it's a very lively, comforting prison, full of people who should be distressed if I truly gave in to either anger or oblivion, which draws the process out considerably, until I am turned inside out again to remind me that even my mind, even my memories of the dead are no longer my own.

[Savage, but precise, without ever raising his voice. It is how it is.]