You think through an opaque gel. Your sight narrows to a pinhole. You can barely comprehend that the letters form words that form sentences, much less wrap your mind around the argument that these papers try to make then dissect and critique them, give them feedback to improve. These are not metaphors so much as physical sensations. You eyeballs hurt. Your brain aches. The air itself does not have the strength to move this weight on your lungs.

Scholarly writing, the papers for conferences or for publication, elicit similar bodily responses. You have always said that the difficulty of academic writing lies in seeing something in three or even four dimensions but having to express it in the single dimension of the line on the page. Those three and four dimensions pull away from you in a blur, as if you have taken off your glasses. You cannot seem to find that place in your head where you store words. The capacity for concentrated, directed language has escaped you. The capacity for concentration has escaped.

You bleed ink into your journal, words to your therapist, shape this all into rants and jokes and reflections online. The deluge of sadness and rage sweep language through a gorge carved so deeply through the center of your being that the source itself has been overrun. Attempting to direct or stem the flood only forces the rage and sadness elsewhere with more power. The power exhausts you.

That crystal bubble in which you imagined yourself earlier in the fall begins to crack. The equal pressure from both inside and outside had maintained the tension that held the walls together. Now, inside has become stronger, you feel the stress increase, the surface cracking.

You await the shatter.