[Once as a very little girl she'd played a game with her grandfather as the pair of them sat on the stone estate wall. The game went like this: he would point out different animals - the geese on the lake, the deer grazing in the meadow, the game master's old terrier marching like a regimented foot soldier in his master's shadow -, and she would name them all the wrong things until he laughed. That's a fish, and those are horses, and there is the stable yard cat. What do you mean you can't see them?
This feels something like that, where the words are all in order but have been applied to a thing they don't belong to. She hasn't been crying quite hard enough not to miss all his desperate unhappiness.
(Or maybe the trick is that she's just miserable enough herself to actually recognize it.)]
I don't understand.
[Which feels so objectively helpless, exposed there in the corridor, that she can feel her eyes starting to go hot with tears again.]
no subject
This feels something like that, where the words are all in order but have been applied to a thing they don't belong to. She hasn't been crying quite hard enough not to miss all his desperate unhappiness.
(Or maybe the trick is that she's just miserable enough herself to actually recognize it.)]
I don't understand.
[Which feels so objectively helpless, exposed there in the corridor, that she can feel her eyes starting to go hot with tears again.]