The Days of Abandonment

by Elena Ferrante

Ugly bitch. She was the one who needed a leash.

a jolt of grief so intense that the tears seemed to me fragments of a crystal object stored for a long time in a secret place and now, because of that movement, shattered into a thousand stabbing shards.

Obtuse though I was, I pretended to be a right angle, and had managed to choke off even my vocation of moving from fantasy to fantasy.