In order to understand the story, her friends said, we need to know why they stopped feeling desire in the first place.

But if she could lay it all out for them, she thought, why would the story need to be told? She would love to be able to lay it all out.

Instead, there were gaps and points of confusion and missed moments and opportunities and she couldn’t identify them all. What was important? What didn’t matter at all? What had she confused as being the former when it was truly the latter? She didn’t really know.

They wanted to know Why.  

Was it always like this, they asked? Or was it like this because of the mess?

If only she knew. She was not certain which things fell into which category; what was cause, what was effect, what just happened. Some things happened, she thought, other things didn’t.

What was the cause of it all. She wished she knew. It wasn’t so clear.

But: Why? They asked.

She wondered if there was any Why at all. Was there always a Why?

And if there wasn’t a Why, she worried: how would she ever know what to do?