Amora: Stories

by Natalia Borges Polesso

That interaction planted itself in her everyday feelings. Letícia’s red lips. Thoughts that had for years been trapped in some shadowy part of her head, now released in words.

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.

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. I’m stuck.

I’m not sure if it’s talking or desire that I’m afraid of.

There I am, trying to break through, and I only manage to scratch the surface. How many times have I been here, exactly? I don’t learn. I don’t remember things, I can’t draw connections, and most of the time, I don’t even understand what I’ve said myself.”

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.

But it was a disjoining, a sense of unbelonging, of having been torn from the world, beaten far from what we understand love to be.