#94

The past few weeks had required an extraordinary amount of understanding impossible situations. Sometimes she tried to ground herself by recalling old facts. She’d been lying awake at three in the morning, trying to remember if Mina Loy was the poet or the actress in The Thin Man movies. She googled Mina Loy and read that Gertrude Stein once said of her: Mina Loy … was able to understand without the commas.

To understand without the commas. Though Gertrude had said it in reference to a specific work, there was something ubiquitous and utilitarian about the phrase.

She whispered the words over and over again like an incantation: To understand without the commas. To understand without the commas.

To pause is to perish when nothing can be understood without looking forward or backward or upward or noward should you take a moment to make sense and consider too deeply you drown in trying to make meaning so do not stop she said and kept going if Mina can I can too.