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THE WALMART PHENOMENON
The “Walmart Phenomenon” is an unexplained behavior that seems to affect most Walmart customers that I have spoken to. The stories though varied are mostly the same plot: Customer needs a few items from Walmart, end result with customer leaving store, vaguely staring down at receipt for $100 in confusion.
Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power ... that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.
— Marcel Proust
'Do you like me?'
No answer.
Silence bounced, fell off his tongue
and sat between us
and clogged my throat.
It slaughtered my trust.
It tore cigarettes out of my mouth.
We exchanged blind words,
and I did not cry,
I did not beg,
but blackness filled my ears,
blackness lunged in my heart,
and something that had been good,
a sort of kindly oxygen,
turned into a gas oven.
— Anne Sexton
Plants did not merely grow tall; they grew wide, curious about their surroundings, eager to seek nourishment from anywhere they could get it. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes I had to prune them back or watch a branch snap and wilt. My garden was a patchwork of failures and successes. I loved it.
— Loretta Nyhan, Digging In