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the quiet intermission of a sunday afternoon was interrupted by the sudden jolt of the front door opening. opening, in more ways than one, on the next scene in what had become a predictably suburban play. the action resumed when a short woman with excess fat compacted to her hips came in, yelling upstairs: "k, come help me with these groceries." the woman tossed her keys down on the stoop by the front door and went back out. she returned with a double-bagged gallon of milk. she always double-bagged the milk--to prevent it from sweating inside the trunk of her four year-old car which still smelled new. in her mind, she rehearsed this and other defenses to explain her actions to an aggregate ever-cynical and ever-questioning entity who was equal parts her father and past boyfriends. she'd been criticized so much in her character-building years, that she was naturally defensive. it'd become second-nature to her, with everything she did, to formulate and outline responses which she could then recall later should someone ask her to explain her actions. she eventually decided that this came with the territory of being a severely introverted personality.
there was an ongoing narrative inside her head which she found impossible to articulate to anyone, including herself. she'd tried myriad forms of self-expression to get it down--to get it out--but to no avail. it was too weird. too idiosyncratic and hard to put into universal logic. she tried keeping a journal: but reviewing some of the entries, she was horrified by how much it resembled the sort of neurotic tangents characteristic of paranoid schizophrenics. so: she thought up defenses: terse little excuses that she could rattle off easily. like a newscaster breaking news on a perpetual disaster, she tried to maintain an on-air face while her brain sent her constant updates.