the amber sea over the buried thing
My whole descent into somewhat-heavier-than-normal drinking may have been some instinctive attempt to bury third-grade feelings of despicability, submerge them in an amber sea.
Context
Ewell arriving, unassisted, at the program's account of his own drinking: the "somewhat-heavier-than-normal" habit reframed as an instinctive burial detail, decades of alcohol poured over a single childhood shame to keep it submerged. It is the disease read backward from the bottom — not appetite but anesthesia, the drink recruited to hold a buried thing under an amber sea until the sea itself becomes the problem.