I kind of both love and hate this book.

It is very beautiful written, it is extremely poetic. It is so beautiful that I had to slowly consume this book over the span of two weeks because it filled me with such indescribable emotions that I simply needed time to consume. I'd sit here, rereading a phrase over and over.

It was beautiful. The first part of it. Then.. then it goes downhill. This felt like two stories meshed together, and the contrast between the two was so shocking it felt unreal. And here is the thing, if we ignore how beautiful this was written. Plotwise, it kind of sucks.

While I'm sure we've all had plenty of experience with self destructive behavior in our younger years. There are usually signs, a slow decline, odd behavior popping up. What the protagonist in this story does here however, is going from 0 to 100 in a flat second. And the way he shuts down is unforgivable to me. It makes the entire novel seem hollow and unrealistic: How can you love someone so fiercely, and still throw it away when nothing bad has happened between the two of you?

But then, maybe that's the point, the story is also written in a way where you could believe it is a real story from the authors younger years. And we all know, life doesn't make sense. We all know, logic doesn't always follow our choices and decisions. Not like how a storyteller tells and plans a story. The open ending also kind of helps support this, where the narrative changes to making it sound like a letter he's writing to her.

I still love this book.
I will still probably think about it for a long time.
But I still want to smack the choices in it.