i feel a little ill. marianne and connell both have pieces of me that i struggle everyday with. a veritably tiny part of me that honors marianne's feeling of being an invisible observer, the desire to feel something human, and though knowing what they want, wants to explicitly be someone's choice without having to verbalize it. on the other hand, i'm connell too—someone who cannot stop comparing the world as someone of the lower class; who has a will to live but not to pursuit it; who gnaws at his guilt on whether he deserves half of what he's got; who feels like he's going around in circles and that the future is bleak.

rooney humanizes them, painfully so. maybe that's why i can't finish it in one fell swoop—it's too raw, i think. it makes me flip the words over and over in my head. like a malleable clay they handed me to destress. this was a bad pick to reread in my office lmao. i remember reading this a few years ago, but i think time away in some of the worst years of my life has since given me a perspective to this book that i never had before.

*i didn't mark this as spoiler because i feel these were more themes in the book than they are actual spoilers.