Everything is desolate and barren and forsaken.

I feel lost and confused like when I was little, driving in the car with my dad, and we’d drive past a sign that said “SLOW CHILDREN.” He’d tell me to look around and try to find some. I’m like that David After Dentist kid, worried and incoherent. “Is this real life? Why is this happening to me?”

I am calling on every deity I can think of. I want to be blessed by a stooped and dusty rabbi. I want to feel the coarse fibers of a prayer rug beneath my knees as I cry out to Allah. Hail Mary full of grace.

Things are not going well.

Life is hurting me, and I have that tight, short-of-breath feeling in my chest, as if my heart were being forced through a garlic press. On a gentler day, I would wax philosophic on the benefits of trials and suffering. It is necessary to suffer to be beautiful, I would say. Broken hearts are exquisite: they let you know you’re truly living. But today is not a gentle day and I have been alternating between the urge to burrow deep within the earth with scoopy little mole feet and the mighty desire to overturn the refrigerator. I don’t know how to be a person with feelings, which is unfortunate since I seem to have been born as a human being. “Feelings” is kind of our forte.

I want a salve, something to spread on my chest like a mustard plaster to relieve all this pressure and hurt. Something to soothe me, something to heal me. Something something something that would make this all go away. I’m having Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind fantasies. Tell me, what do you do when you’re sad? What is it that gets you through the wicked, sandpaper days of a heart freshly crushed before time takes over and helps you forget?