Welcome to Litsy!

Arrangements in Blue is intense, raw, poetic prose on the absence of romantic love in the life of a woman who idealises it.

Amy Key writes with a vulnerability that is painful to me. The world is not a place that celebrates the single, whole woman & coming to terms with this is fraught with obstacles.

I have so much to say about this book, but I fear it will turn into an outpouring of personal grief.

Beautiful, fragile, and poetic.

"I summon the defences of romantic lovelessness... [the song] is though, eager to undermine my situation, to designate my life incomplete.

I open the windows above a windowsill on which I have arranged the precious totems of my life. Let the rain & wind disrupt & ruin what I felt content with. A deliberate trashing. Like the lack of another soul that I can touch makes my own soul smaller, insubstantial.

And I so badly want to have a soul."

"In that sudden, temporary darkness, I had one of those moments of bold thought that you feel might change you forever: I would never be loved in the body I am in by someone I could trust with it. I had never felt loved in the body I am in.

How could I enjoy a shell-shaped pool when I didn't know if I would ever feel loved? I was dessicating from the lack of it."

This book 😭😭😭

"Still, as much as I take seriously the cooking of meals just for myself or to eat with others, every so often I think of peaceful meals between two people who are in love with an ache that seems perilously close to my skin..

I love to live alone, but I long to know I'm real beyond my own comprehension."

This book is full of a familiar longing for which I'm yet to find a sufficient balm. Still, it's probably not all it's cracked up to be, right?