The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation – it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him.
Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it’s okay to be a boy; for girls it’s like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.
These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing – it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.
But how to do feelings? All very well to write “She felt sad”, or describe what a sad person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immediacy? Even harder was the threat, or the confusion of feeling contradictory things.
When there are no consequences, being wrong is simply a diversion.
It was always the view of my parents,” Emily said, “that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.
But of course, it had all been her – by her and about her, and now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky.
Being late was a special kind of modern suffering, with blended elements of rising tension, self-blame, self-pity, misanthropy, and a yearning for what could not be had outside theoretical physics: time reversal.
The trouble with being a daydreamer who doesn’t say much is that the teachers at school, especially those who don’t know you very well, are likely to think you’re rather stupid. Or, if not stupid, then dull. No one can see the amazing things that are going on in your head.
The narrative compression of storytelling, especially in the movies, beguiles us with happy endings into forgetting that sustained stress is corrosive of feeling. It’s the great deadener. Those moments of joyful release from terror are not so easily had.