retreatretreat - Tumblr blog

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We are different and then also not, the people of my temporary Thanksgiving geography and I. We both want to survive through another year. Still, they were taught to run toward guns for survival, and I was taught to run from them, or even the illusion of them. Soon, I will retreat to the kitchen and chop something large into something smaller with the sharp blade of a knife that I would never carry outside of this home, for fear of the what the land and the people in it would make of me.

Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us

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The band was breaking apart, but not broken up, reveling in the false stories before falling into piles of cocaine to forget them. When the spring of 1976 came, they retreated to a recording studio in California. No longer at the edge of chaos, but fully immersed in it.

Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us

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Dressed in a dark blazer and with his blond hair neatly shocked across his head, not obscured by a hat, as it had been for the past several years, it is almost impossible for people to process the fact that they are looking at Patrick. Until he gazes, briefly, up at the growing and silent audience, gives an uneasy laugh, and retreats.

Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us

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My question is this: that retreat Hudson talks about, that spot where he's feeling peaceful but also tormented by the water & the spirits beneath the water, is that feeling solitude or loneliness?

Rion Amilcar Scott, The World Doesn’t Require You

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Mr. Washington took Philemon's advice and ordered all guns turned on the Johnson Family in a sort of unbalanced warfare. When they largely retreated, most of our crew leaders were left with bigger territories, except for us. Somehow our territory shrank and we found ourselves scrounging for every dollar we could come across.

Rion Amilcar Scott, The World Doesn’t Require You

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Once they heard a voice exclaim from the front room: Connell has a girlfriend? And another voice replied: Yeah, she's in the kitchen. Lorraine and Marianne exchanged a look. They heard a brief thunder of footsteps, and then a teenage boy appeared in the doorway wearing a United jersey. Immediately on seeing Marianne, who was standing at the sink, the boy became shy and stared at his feet. Hi there, she said. He flicked her a nod without making eye contact, and then trudged a retreat to the living room. Lorraine thought that was really funny.

Sally Rooney, Normal People

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The Widow, about to retreat, thought better of it and advanced again to the stove. "You understand," her playful tone with Sally changed, barbed now with an odd emotional intensity, "I do not care how many people are in the house as long as it is always full. You must learn to share. The cupboards, the stove, they are not just for you. They are also for the Others." She put on her glittering yellow-toothed smile then, as if to outshine her bluntness.

Sylvia Plath, “That Widow Mangada,” Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams

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She lit the gas fire and then the gas ring, its circle of flames flaring up blue to her retreating hand, leaping to scorch.

Sylvia Plath, “Stone Boy with Dolphin,” Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams

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Oswald, his receding Neanderthal head brushed straight across with slicked hair to hide the shiny retreating slope, peered at Dody through his tortoiseshell glasses.

Sylvia Plath, “Stone Boy with Dolphin,” Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams

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The four winds sounded retreat, defeat, hooing off down their tunnel in the world's sea-girdled girth. Oh, hollow, hollow. Hollow in the chambered stone.

Sylvia Plath, “Stone Boy with Dolphin,” Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams

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Dody retreated with a taste of lemons into her green sanctum at Arden with her stone facsimile of Verrocchio's boy. To dust, to worship: vocation enough.

Sylvia Plath, “Stone Boy with Dolphin,” Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams

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Now, lulled by the putter of the car, and feigning sleep, Norton began to will toward him all the animals of the forest--the fog-colored, delicately striated antelope, the lumbering, tousled buffalo, the red foxes, the bears. In his mind's eye he saw them pause, startled, as by some alien presence, in their deep thickets and noonday retreats. He saw them, one by one, turn and converge toward the center where he sat, fiercely, indefatigably willing the movement of each hoof and paw.

Sylvia Plath, “The Fifty-Ninth Bear,” Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams

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My, my. The incredible fixed reminiscences of a spinster. Her looking out at German bombers, realizing she was in a nightgown, & retreating in blushes from the window, and the ring of young men leaning from neighboring windows.

Sylvia Plath, “The Smiths: George, Marjorie (50), Claire (16),” Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams

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It was only as the rector picked up his two prayer books and his black hat that Esther remembered the plate of sugared cakes and the waiting tea tray in the kitchen. But by then it was too late. Something more than forgetfulness, she thought, watching the rector's measured retreat through the green nettles, had kept back those cakes.

Sylvia Plath, “Mothers,” Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams

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He didn't call me for a few weeks. This was customary within our friendship, confide and retreat, but I wondered. I wondered if perhaps our last conversation had been an overture. Not the conversation, exactly, but the silences within it. There had been many dark pits of tea-sipping silence; looking back, I could imagine placing my hand on his hand while kneeling in one of these dark pits. And in such a pit could one even be sure what one was doing?

Miranda July, “How to Tell Stories to Children,” No one belongs here more than you.