The thing nobody tells you about being with someone who can feel your emotional state through a bond is that there is no such thing as a private bad day.
I discovered this on a morning when nothing specific had happened.
No attack. No revelation. No letter from a dead father or arrival of a woman with my eyes. Just — a morning when the weight of everything that had happened pressed in from all directions simultaneously, and I woke up and felt it, and couldn't immediately locate the specific cause, and that absence of cause made it worse because at least with a cause you have something to address.
I was in the kitchen before I'd fully decided to be there. The movement was automatic — the way I moved toward cooking when I didn't know what else to do with myself. I had the burner on and so
