Author Statement: “In The Silent Woman (1994), Janet Malcolm wrote of her and Plath’s generation that “we lied to our parents and we lied to each other and we lied to ourselves”. She spoke of her generation as being addicted to deception. In deception, I believe, lies the root of major issues between people and in the world today. It is this contradiction, and by extrapolation, this violence—physical, as well as one that hurts the psyche and soul—that usually remains concealed, and which must be reinvented through poetry and literature. In the world my characters in Behavior Patterns inhabit, there is violence, hate and hurt (physical in case of Zoe, and mental in case of the second person narrator). Their compulsions hold them under a tight leash, but they yearn to break free (The two of you will take on ‘a meaning’, as they say couples do, when matches are made in heaven. Maybe make love on a moonless beach, as other people do. You are blushing, but it’s only a dry brown leaf, flattened between pages, veins indistinct.). Narrator’s and Zoe’s lives run parallelly, mirroring and augmenting each other, and in their quiet, restrained rebelliousness, they release the rage and disillusionment as Plath would. Behavior Patterns provides an undercurrent of anguish that is redeemed through the pursuit of, what I term as, ‘extraordinary ordinariness’. Like Plath, I’m attracted to natural, accessible objects' magnetic qualities (miniature city of Lego blocks, piano, mirror, traffic symbols, watercolor) that enhance the mundane, and also signified with such details as ‘plastered to the chair by the window, beyond which the sunshine is a pale ochre, the outlines of hills smudged with teal’. Plath’s underscoring the act of "seeing", fixated on objects and environments either "seen" or overlooked in the eyes of others, inspires this piece and transfers the triumph of spirit in the face of odds.”