Lo mejor que he leído, visto y escuchado en 2022

Leído:

Beautiful World, Where Are you, Sally Rooney - 'Maybe certain kinds of pain, at certain formative stages in life, just impress themselves into a person's sense of self permanently. Like the way I didn't lose my virginity until I was twenty and it was so painful and awkward and bad, and since then I've always felt like exactly the kind of person that would happen to, even though before then I didn't. And now I just feel like the kind of person whose life partner would fall out of love with them after several years, and I can't find a way not to be that kind of person anymore.'

Estaré sola y sin fiesta, Sara Barquinero - 'Tengo una teoría del amor, ¿sabes? En realidad, sirve para todas las cosas importantes. Cuando estás enamorado no piensas, solo te dejas llevar y no haces las cosas con cabeza. Solo cuando se termina del todo puedes valorarlo: aquí hice bien, aquí mal, esto me convenía, esto otro no. Pero solo al final del camino, no mientras pasa. Así que tienes que vivir muchas historias de amor y aprender. Para que así, cuando toque la buena, lo hagas bien, sin errores, reconociendo las señales: mira, en esto es idéntica a Adela, aquí es igual que cuando me equivoqué con Carmen, esta cosa que no soporto es lo que me hizo romper con Clara. Pero eso solo lo puedes entender cuando todo ha terminado y ya no tiene solución. Por eso durante esos años yo quería vivir todas las historias posibles, muy rápido. Para estar preparado cuando viniese la buena'.

Fierce Attachments, Lena Dunham: 'As a fantasy and nostalgia addict who is now married, I wondered if I would have pangs for old flames, if I would see pictures of men I had once donned Little Black Dresses for and dream of running into them on an empty corner. We are early yet, but it hasn’t happened and I don’t think I will. When I lie in bed at night, husband already snoring, my mind goes back to the women who were in my life and are no longer. The friend who took me all through Tribeca eating at fancy restaurants and never being handed a bill because of her arresting beauty. The one I took long walks around Brooklyn with, talking about romance novels and manor houses, whose motherhood journey forked away from mine and a silent chasm opened. The blonde who told me, in no uncertain terms, my circumstances had become a bit heavy for her, and the artist who I thought would always be a phone call away but who somehow simply isn’t. The smell of the bedsheets in my best friend’s house, how we lay there prone after big parties dissecting every interaction we found spicy. And her. And her and her and her and her and her.'

Confessions of a Perpetually Single Woman, Morgan Parker: 'The problem is time. It shouldn’t matter, but it does. Time means regret. Regret means self-punishment. It’s not just the general embarrassment of having the romantic subplot of my movie being introduced so late into act 2, it’s also the close-fitting sense that time runs out faster for women like me. What if I die before getting a look at myself in the bright mirror that is partnership, before tasting what everybody’s talking about? Before finding somewhere to pour this devotion I’ve stored up, all this romance I’ve accumulated and dreamed? I’m a poet who’s never experienced true romantic love; I believe this is an American tragedy.'

Ghosts, Dolly Alderton: 'Being a heterosexual woman who loved men meant being a translator for their emotions, a palliative nurse for their pride and a hostage negotiator for their egos.'

On Nighttime, Hanif Abdurraqib: 'I learned to value the way a voice can interrupt longing. How it builds a bridge that feels real from the place you are to the place you want to be. How its familiar sound can heal and reassure under even the worst circumstances.' (...) 'That’s the miracle, too. The impossibility isn’t in the breakup, but in whatever comes after. The very fact that someone can be driven to write a love song and then a breakup song about the same person. The thing that happens when people are with someone and they can’t imagine a world without them. The thing that happens when people fall out of love and can’t imagine the world they had before. The song, becoming something newer and better as an old wound closes, or a new wound opens up. The pink light of dawn is a salve or a scar, depending on who is doing the looking and what the night offered up or stole away.'

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