A review by raf08
We Don't Know What We're Doing by Thomas Morris

dark emotional funny reflective medium-paced

3.5

We toast to new beginnings, though I don’t know what new thing I’m actually beginning,

 I think of my mother asleep. The weight of her arm draped over the side of the couch; the way the light came in through the window.

the night melting purple through the windows. 

but he’s afraid to kiss it, he’s afraid that if he does she’ll ask him to stop.

 And all these days have merged into one long summer’s day, and every year he remembers less and less.

The diaries are only ten years old, but already you can’t remember the fifteen-year-old who seems so unhappy in these pages.

You can’t believe you forgot the way it felt to lie in this bed, the way it felt to look out this window.

And this house, these rooms, this phone, these voices – you know they should mean more to you, but they don’t. It’s like the opposite of déjà vu.

Your father once asked: ‘What are you running away from?’

when you look in the mirror, the reflection isn’t familiar. You can’t pick out a single feature that belongs to you. 

I was seventeen and in mourning for a first love gone awry.

 And you know what I’m most tired of? Knowing that this is just the start, that I’ll only get more tired as I get older,

but this is how life lived in Amy: with spider legs, scuttling in all directions.

From the age of eleven, Emily began to hold herself oddly – all slumped and shifty – as if she didn’t know how to be.

‘They were boys,’ the guide will say. ‘The ones who fought for independence, they were younger than all you.’

But I couldn’t put words to these feelings and the way they swung. Some days it felt as if the feelings weren’t even inside of me. They were airborne – in Caerphilly’s stupid streets – and I just happened to breathe them in.

There were times when it felt like I was the one drowning myself, pushing on my own head as I sunk.


 It was as if I was recovering all the sleep debt from the years I’d been working. 

It was as if she was weighing up the gains and the losses of love. How sad, I thought. But also, how lovely.

 And I spent my whole life worried about him finding out. And when he died, a tiny part of me – and you’re going to think I’m awful for saying this – but, well, a tiny, tiny part of me felt relieved cos it meant he’d never find out.’

though they never really did go to the beach. The beach was always so far away.

 He never gave them enough time. If he’s honest, he didn’t know how to love them.