chirysalis’s Reviews > Self-Help > Status Update

"I think of my father, imagine him long ago at night casually parting my mother's legs with the mechanical indifference of someone opening a cupboard. And I say to myself: I will leave every cold man, every man for whom music is some private physics and love some unsteppable dance. I will try to make them regret. To make them sad."

""Music ultimately left him unstirred.
Like a god irritated with his own tinkerings. Despite his talent, or perhaps because of it, he heard only the machinery, the clanking and spitting. He felt nothing. No compassion." She coughed. "You would think creating something would necessarily be an act of love or compassion.""

"—you hear all you have sacrificed, all you have given, landing with a loud clunk. They lock the greenhouse and you are as tiny as a figure in an architect's drawing, a faceless splotch, a blur of stick limbs abandoned in some voluminous desert of stone."

""Cold men destroy women," [...] "They woo them with something personable that they bring out for show, something annexed to their souls like a fake greenhouse, lead you in, and you think you see life and vitality and sun and greenness, and then when you love them, they lead you out into their real soul, a drafty, cavernous, empty ballroom, inexorably arched and vaulted and mocking you with its echoes..."

this is so sad it hurts