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.

Every time I ended up in his armchair, I felt like burrowing into its mossy velvet, like I was lichenizing—melding with the fabric’s fur until I’d dissolved into its green, lifeless embrace. The rug between us was a black hole. A spiral drawing that sucked up my eyes and thoughts. I sat there in silence, staring at the curtain over the window behind him. I wanted to stay just like that, hardly taking in the hot January air. But the hole yanked my eyes to the middle of the room, and next thing I knew, there he was, eyes fixed on me as he waited for me to pour out my insides. As if it were easy, or effortless, or ordinary to draw our tensions to the surface. To make words breach our throats and come out nice and neat, full of exact or ambiguous meaning.

From "Wild Inside"

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.

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.

This one is for my husband- the one that bleeds dark roast, black coffee.