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ellieafterall 's review for:
The Regrets
by Amy Bonnaffons
surprising and sinister; i enjoyed this in the way you enjoy unexpectedly waking up to find summer outside your window (blue skies, swaying trees, unrelenting sun, and an expectancy—as if the world was waiting for you).
the story itself carries a sharp sort of knowing. despite faltering at some points, it eventually drives the point of its edge deep into you (albeit a bit too late).
Every individual love story takes place within a larger fabric of desire, stretching out infinitely, pulled from every possible direction. When you think about it, it’s miraculous that anyone sticks together at all.
Certain people belong so completely to a particular time and place that they stay preserved in your mind there, as though trapped in a slow globe—you can nostalgically pick it up every now and then, give it a shake, feel something stir to the surface, but the scenes themselves don’t change.
Did it even make sense to use the word “I” anymore? I was like the photographic negative of a person, an absence given form, a loose ache of consciousness attached to a cheap facsimile of a body; I could blend in anywhere only because I belonged nowhere.
Gravity was a kind of embrace: the earth gathering in the rain, garnering in everything, including me—holding me close to its body, reminding me I belonged.
I know you’re concerned for my heart, but I’m not entirely sure I have one, not in the same way as other people. That hard little first in my chest, it won’t ever completely unclench. So what if I tempt fate?
This turned out to be my favorite time of day: its coolness, its silence. The city looked scrubbed and expectant; the block crouched, hushed, like a tree just moments before all the birds launch themselves from its branches in one rustling swoop. In the morning my pain was mostly just the ache of being in the world, enfleshed and aware; I’d sit there on the stoop, opening and closing my eyes, gently trying to assimilate the unbelievable fact of this body.
the story itself carries a sharp sort of knowing. despite faltering at some points, it eventually drives the point of its edge deep into you (albeit a bit too late).
Every individual love story takes place within a larger fabric of desire, stretching out infinitely, pulled from every possible direction. When you think about it, it’s miraculous that anyone sticks together at all.
Certain people belong so completely to a particular time and place that they stay preserved in your mind there, as though trapped in a slow globe—you can nostalgically pick it up every now and then, give it a shake, feel something stir to the surface, but the scenes themselves don’t change.
Did it even make sense to use the word “I” anymore? I was like the photographic negative of a person, an absence given form, a loose ache of consciousness attached to a cheap facsimile of a body; I could blend in anywhere only because I belonged nowhere.
Gravity was a kind of embrace: the earth gathering in the rain, garnering in everything, including me—holding me close to its body, reminding me I belonged.
I know you’re concerned for my heart, but I’m not entirely sure I have one, not in the same way as other people. That hard little first in my chest, it won’t ever completely unclench. So what if I tempt fate?
This turned out to be my favorite time of day: its coolness, its silence. The city looked scrubbed and expectant; the block crouched, hushed, like a tree just moments before all the birds launch themselves from its branches in one rustling swoop. In the morning my pain was mostly just the ache of being in the world, enfleshed and aware; I’d sit there on the stoop, opening and closing my eyes, gently trying to assimilate the unbelievable fact of this body.