I lived inside that monologue for, I think, many days before it cracked a little, became two pieces so that a little light could enter and there was a space where I could burrow into it. The space strengthened me, and I tried to see where that truth and my truth diverged and how it had happened that now, by the light of what Abra said, I was mad. It came to me that her argument was sound; she had not been satisfied, things had not been as right as they had appeared, and she hadn’t faced that reality, hadn’t known what part of the mechanism that was Abra was not functioning smoothly; had not, in that way, grown up at all. That life contained the dreamer, wishing vaguely, uneasily, for something different; and at the same time it contained, for a very long time, the practical woman, coping and comforting. The two had co-existed and not, it had seemed at the time, with the kind of trauma that required this result. For some, perhaps, that co-existence, the two lines running along in the same person, separated from each other like lines on a railroad without ties, are not parallel, but come together at some point, and when they do there is this cataclysm called a breakdown.

And yet that was not, it seemed to me, what had happened.

The crack was widening; there was more space now for me to move around inside the discussion, and I was stronger.

The two lines had never met, they had remained parallel; but instead of continuing into infinity, or coming together with an explosion, they had simply vanished, at some indefinable, unanalyzable point had just ceased to exist. They had broken down.

I became able, after a time, to understand that there had been what might be called a breakdown. The theory, the logic, were acceptable.

The struggle could not end there; it was not possible to stop, although with the understanding, the old Abra had disappeared, and I was in charge of the questioning, no one else. I never, in all the restless burrowing, considered going back, never once felt an impulse to return to face their standards, to become a “grown-up.” That was not, in any recess of my mind, a possibility. Still I went on, into “breakdown.”

Accepting the word, it became simpler. If “breakdown” meant some terrible anguish, I had missed that part of it until now, questioning it. There had been strain, unhappiness, even fear, but nothing that could properly be called anguish. I moved to the next step: where had the breakdown come? And it came to me that all the components of the old life had, in fact, broken down: the home, the children, the marriage, whatever had made up life then. Everything else, everything outside of me, had broken down. I saw that I had not broken down. I had been put together.