Breakdown.

The word needles its way into conversations, thoughts, the day, even though it’s spring and sunny and the flowers are bursting and the trees are going crazy green.

The breakdown of routine and social norms and expectations: cancelled birthday parties, trips, weddings, commencements, and school on a flat screen. Life flattened. Out with the old, but not sure of the new. The future is broken, too, and no one has a clue.

I’m curious how to capture this brokenness at the sentence level, because so much feels fractured, and when I set out to write, I want to capture that sensation. I want to mimic what happens to the mind when it expects one reality but is delivered another. When the mind has traveled the groove of one narrative only to find that that storyline has been decimated. And it can’t imagine what will replace it.

Toni Morrison’s novel, Sula, comes to mind, a story in which the female character suffers a heart-smashing event that rattles her core, severing her narrative thread. Magically, wonderfully, Morrison creates that experience not only through the story, but in her sentences.

In Sula, the characters Nel and Sula have been best friends forever. So when Sula sleeps with Nel’s husband, destroying her marriage, Nel’s world cracks open like an egg.

Until that event, Morrison tells the story using third person, but after the rupture of the marriage and the friendship on p. 104—just after the halfway point of the book—Morrison shifts to first person. We are deep inside the fractured mind of Nel. To prepare us for this shift, Morrison first uses dialogue: though her husband isn’t there, Nel imagines what she’d tell him.

“But Jude,” she would say, “you knew me. All those days and years, Jude, you knew me. My ways and my hands and how my stomach folded and how we tried to get Mickey to nurse and how about that time when the landlord said… but you said… and I cried, Jude. You knew me and had listened to the things I said in the night, and heard me in the bathroom and laughed at my raggedy girdle and I laughed too because I knew you too, Jude. So how could you leave me when you knew me?”

The refrain, “you knew me” is repeated four times, with a slight deviation, “I knew you too,” mimicking a mind that is in shock, that can’t step beyond the trauma that has happened. The use of ellipses, “when the landlord said… but you said… and I cried,” depicts thoughts that can’t completed because they are too painful.

Morrison returns to third person, then jumps back to first, setting it up like this:

For now her thighs were truly empty and dead too, and it was Sula who had taken the life from them and Jude who smashed her heart and the both of them who left her with no thighs and no heart just her brain raveling away.

Raveling away. Ravel, to become unwoven, untwisted, unwound, to break up, crumble. And then Morrison shows us the raveling.

And what am I supposed to do with these old thighs now, just walk up and down these rooms? What good are they, Jesus? They will never give me the peace I need to get from sunup to sundown, what good are they, are you trying to tell me that I am going to have to go all the way through these days, all the way, O my god, to that box with four handles with never nobody settling down between my legs even if I sew up those pillow cases andrinse down the porch and feed my children and beat the rugs and haul the coal up out of the bin even then nobody, O Jesus, I could be a mule or plow the furrows with my hands if need be or hold these rickety walls up with my back if need be if I knew that somewhere in this world in the pockets of some night I could open my legs to some cowboy lean hips but you are trying to tell me no and O my sweet Jesus what kind of cross is that?

The pleading questions that hang there, unanswered; the comma splices to mimic the speed with which the raveling mind is crumbling; the repetition, “all the way,” and “if need be”—these are techniques to capture the mental breakdown. The use of polysyndeton—the repetition of conjunctions in close succession—heightens the emotion and creates the sensation of the immense amount of work Nel has to do as a single mother with children. The list isn’t one or two things, it’s five (sew the pillow cases, rinse down the porch…), which creates a feeling that the list could go on and on.

At the beginning of the passage, the comma splices separate the independent clauses. By the end, the commas have fallen out of the run-on sentences. We are deep in the tortured mind of Nel. In that private space, the reader has vanished, and so has the need to help the reader negotiate the sentence.