I could be unraveling wherever I'm traveling, even to foreign shores.

i want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.

I started violently, as if some unseen hand had goosed me.

And I in terror but not in doubt of what I must do in anguish, in haste, wrenched from the earth root after root, the soil heaving and cracking, the moss tearing asunder — and behind me the others: my brothers forgotten since dawn. In the forest they too had heard, and were pulling their roots in pain out of a thousand years' layers of dead leaves, rolling the rocks away, breaking themselves out of their depths.

And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart.

I should have known […] I am the rain. […] I am the land […] and I am the rain. The grass will grow out of me in a little while.

Before my eyes he wilted like a wet sock.

I felt translucent, so fragile that one more rejection would make me come fully undone.

shoes were so cut and slashed that they were ready to fall from her feet.

PLEASE BELIEVE that I am falling apart. I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug — that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of acceleration. I ask you only to accept (as I have accepted) that I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust.

And, as doth be human, I brake my rule straightway in the beginning.

She gave the impression that she had somehow slipped off her leash. As though she was taking herself for a walk while the rest of us were being walked – like pets.

I fear I will be ripped open and found unsightly.

Thing thrown to a corner, rag fallen on the road, my ignoble being feigns itself in front of life.