A review by milo_rose
Like Being Killed by Ellen Miller
5.0
(4.5)
“I thought my buddies might be right about my inability to die. Like the woman at the puddle, like AnnaMaria, I wasn’t dying, and I wasn’t living. I was lingering at that precipice, that edge, that nowhere place where I was alive but barely, delaying the agony of being fully alive, so that meantime I could live partially. If the world wouldn’t kill me, and I couldn’t kill myself, I would be both living and dead. If I could not choose whether to be alive, I would choose how alive I would agree to be. I would calibrate it, measure the degree to which I was willing to participate. All of us–the woman at the puddle, Gerry, AnnaMaria, everyone else up on the rooftops–were playing dead, the way prey animals play dead so as not to be shot. We were both the animals and the hunters with the traps and guns. To avoid being shot–by ourselves, the hunters–we, the hunted, tricked ourselves into believing we were already gone.” (p. 32)
“I thought my buddies might be right about my inability to die. Like the woman at the puddle, like AnnaMaria, I wasn’t dying, and I wasn’t living. I was lingering at that precipice, that edge, that nowhere place where I was alive but barely, delaying the agony of being fully alive, so that meantime I could live partially. If the world wouldn’t kill me, and I couldn’t kill myself, I would be both living and dead. If I could not choose whether to be alive, I would choose how alive I would agree to be. I would calibrate it, measure the degree to which I was willing to participate. All of us–the woman at the puddle, Gerry, AnnaMaria, everyone else up on the rooftops–were playing dead, the way prey animals play dead so as not to be shot. We were both the animals and the hunters with the traps and guns. To avoid being shot–by ourselves, the hunters–we, the hunted, tricked ourselves into believing we were already gone.” (p. 32)