Amora: Stories

by Natalia Borges Polesso

On Thursday, everything seemed far away, because that’s how life works at seventeen, when time’s elastic and changes according to your mood and those innocent needs.

I wanted to know more, I wanted to know everything, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

“No. My language. It’s chaotic, it comes from inside me, from a part of me that’s still wild. A part I don’t understand. I can’t grasp what I’m feeling.

Things get lost between my head and my mouth—somewhere unknown to me—and they never come back.

“You try to rationalize everything, analyze everything, scrutinize everything. Try feeling instead. Think about it, about your impulses.

I wanted to be able to do that, to immerse myself in some dark corner of my life only to surface at the other, brighter end of it.

If in that moment the world were to crumble, if a plane or an overhead door were to crash down on my head, there’d be nothing I could do.

I think any worthwhile experience with drugs has to include a loss of control. And if it doesn’t, just shut up and go get high again, ’cause clearly you did something wrong.

I’m not interested in killing myself, far from it, I’m too self-involved. I just want to live, you know? I don’t want this garbage lesser-than life,

I’ve been thinking of myself as place, you know? The body as place? The body as metaphor for a place traveled, or a life’s cartography—with all its marks, signposts, and islands.

It’s not an exact analogy—the brain’s not the city’s cultural center and the stomach isn’t the gastronomical center—it’s a chaotic, borderless map where streets end in dark, narrow alleyways and where our fingers linger in places that are bitter scented and moist.

He’s too selfish. We all are. No one’s innocent. But now, here I am, with this queasiness that won’t let up, distrustful of love.

Amora, what a perfect name for you. You are made of love.

Today is especially sad because morning came without the promise of sunshine. You know when you look outside and you’re clear on the weather’s limitations, convinced the sky won’t shower you with blues and golds, certain the only color you’ll see is gray?

There are places that exist so that we may revisit memories in temples and so that we may say that there really are temples that hold memories.

cardioelectrophysiological.

I think the only reason I get through the night is the coffee on the other side, at the brighter end of those nighttime hours.

I awake in the darkness of dawn. That’s when I think of the morning and of the coffee I will drink when the sun starts affecting the night. Which is to say that, to me, coffee’s more than just nutritional; it’s built on the fantasy of dawn, a new light that stands in opposition to night, suffering, and darkness.