AUGUST excerpted on Literary Hub
The following is from Romina Paula’s novel, August. Paula is the author of ¿Vos me querés a mí? and Agosto. She is an Argentinian playwright, novelist, director, and actor. Jennifer Croft, recipient of Fulbright, PEN, and National Endowment for the Arts grants, has been published in New York Times, n+1, The New Republic, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD, an MFA, and is the founding editor of The Buenos Aires Review.
"I realize—I think I realize—that I want to leave, but I also know I want to take you with me, and it’s impossible because you’re here, very here, which I just now fully understood. From there, from Buenos Aires, I can miss you so contemplatively, look at you, at us, as though admiring it in a shop window, our common/shared past, behind glass, and I can get into a funk about it but at a safe remove, removed by that pane. There, on the shelf, there’s a weak light that dilutes it down even further, gives it a halo of unreality, of something that happened far away and long ago, something one can step back from to observe, observe from afar, something one attends, as though it were something else, far away, removed from the body..."
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Romina Paula
A young woman parses through the five years since her best friend's suicide in this self-deprecating examination of grief and loss.