Quarrymen dig, so I opened my bloodline and did just that. And I exhumed all the words I could not say. Or face.

The epiphany to excavate myself came one morning around 4 a.m., when I typically have my most honest moments. It was not a bolt of lightning but rather a spark. In the receding silky darkness, I laid in dynamite, struck a match, and blasted my comfortable and confining crypt to hell, a trail of teeth, shards, and shrapnel, my result. And I kept digging, frantically. I was living a subterranean life—the faces, the voices, the eyes, and their heavy breathing jangled angry, a mountain of pennies in my lungs. Breathing was labor.The practice of burying me was methodical, mechanical. The only exchanges I was having were with myself. I was a cluttered labyrinth with no distinguishable door nor window, a seamless box, nested in countless boxes, fashioned by my careful hands, padlocked, and plunged into a hole, paved shut.

Like a hoarders' heaven (haven), I collected and stacked and cataloged exchanges, unwritten letters, tender tidings, retorts, tirades, confessions, and gory screeds. A lifetime's worth, or so it seemed.

And now I rise, each page of this book a slug of new air.

Fresh, above ground.