• She sighed, put her head in her knees, ran her fingers through her hair, prepared herself for the impending gush of emotion and word vomit. The man beside her wouldn't understand but it'd lift the weight nonetheless. “Oh, Nate. I'm just depressed. You know – ” there was a pause as she pulled the words out of her belly and wrapped them around her like a blanket. “I've been thinking about what we should talk about to get us through this... and I just don't know where to start.

    “It's like my life is a Jenga tower, and during my childhood a few pieces were removed from the bottom, and then the whole top part got whacked off. And I was perfectly happy to walk around with a half a holey Jenga tower, because I believed certain things. And then one by one, something happened to make me stop believing those things.

    “Every time I turned around another brick was pulled out, snick, snick, snick, until there was nothing left. And it didn't even have the decency to go clattering to the ground with calamity. It just stayed there. And I don't know which brick we should talk about first.”

    The silence that followed was more to do with letting her spill herself without interruption and less to do with his lack of appropriate response, but she qualified it anyway with “The past two months have been s**t, is what I'm saying.”

    Her vomit depository scooted around awkwardly until he could wrap her in his arms from behind and hold her in his lap. “I'm here baby. Go on.”