Perhaps she is sitting at the table, running a finger over the nail grooves she made last year when in pain and not sleeping she limped through the silent unlit house hurting the wood with a closed-mouth cry. She writhed, a worm callously cut in half, not knowing whether she sat or stood or lay with her face pressed into the grimy kitchen tiles. Her nails in the old pliant wood felt between waves of agony as the sound of chalk bumping down a blackboard does, teeth meeting frozen, softened ice-cream sticks, pulling styrofoam wrapping into squeaky crumbles of fake snow. Like you grinding your teeth into the pillow. Perhaps she is thinking of this when she writes, with stilted language, awkward ill-fitting sentences, like the start of an essay, like she cannot imagine who might be reading.