"The Regrets" by Amy Bonnaffons
"I have scars on my hands from touching certain people." - J.D. Salinger
Trying to grasp the moment itself is like clutching a fistful of broken glass. It cuts me open. I fall out of myself.
In the morning my pain was mostly just the ache of being in the world
After all our years together, she was exquisitely legible to me.
I developed a habit of standing too close to the edges of things, always. I liked the reactions I got when I perched on a balcony railing and calmly lit a cigarette.
I'd been in one of my dark moods all day, the moods that settled onto my body like medieval armor
this was the way our bodies best fit together, traveling comrades facing the same direction
Awe is dangerous.
I could blend in anywhere only because I belonged nowhere.
Is there a form of love that's not a welcome unraveling?
There is a voice inside me, which I suppose is my voice but which I hear as if it's someone else's, the voice that says the words in my head when I read. My relationship to this voice is so intimate, so perfect, that most other people's voices feel like intrusions.
I occasionally felt bad about this difference between us - about the way I reliably failed to inhabit a moment, instead hovering outside of it, catlike, waiting to isolate and pounce on a tellable detail.
she was a narcissist and thus easy to lie to
I knew my myths, and they all said you could kill something by seeing it too clearly.
Perhaps this was Fate: the thudding inevitability contained like a dark seed at the heart of our most private desires.
Certain people belong so completely to a particular time and place that they stay preserved in your mind there, as though trapped in a snow globe.
Haunting is not confined to the realm of ghosts. It is a state of avoidance and obsession. We haunt because we are haunted. Every haunter is also a hauntee.
I only remember certain moments, like a series of still shots from a movie. These moments felt timeless and memory-like even as they were happening
what if everything that happened in life left an obvious mark? I mean, everything important
I felt as though my heart was a rock that had been thrown to the bottom of the ocean. The more alive I felt, the more I hurt.