rotating hamlet in your head when you're NOT mentally unwell is actually a wonderful experience. because now you can see outside the barbed walls of pain. beyond the balcony rails that look like prison bars. you can see the glimmers of gertrude's undeniable love for hamlet, even when she did it all wrong. you can see the defiance in ophelia's yes my lords, a sort of kindredness to the women you grew up with who knew how to pick battles and hide a smirk. you can see the banter between horatio and hamlet, like boys playing in a creek before one moves away for good. you can watch hamlet mouth the plays the thing, wherein ill catch the conscience of the king and have your heart break for the scared son who's clinging to a reason to live through narrative. and oh, how you notice the narrative. how it encircles. how it continues, despite laertes trying to fling himself to be with ophelia, despite horatio's lips almost kissing the cup. now, you can hold the characters gently, with the distance and closeness of a gravedigger. now, you can hold yourself gently: act five is over now. close the curtains, strike the props, hug the other ones who made it out covered in fake blood and real sweat. the play's the thing, and you might have to do it again. the story lives, on and on and on, in a hundred adaptations in a hundred formats. in a hundred broken peoples heads, and sometimes, those people heal long enough to say denmark was a prison, let me tell you about it.