as a guy who rewatched ntbts literally every year since 2019 im experiencing the craziest dopamine rush at the amount of matt and jay im seeing on my feed rn
book posting. it was negative space by b.r. yeager today.
definitely spoilers. tw for sui + drug use. a lot.
hey.
i dont talk here like ever. i know😭 im sorry LOL
ok well my whole thing was just talking about negative space man that book made me feel funny but not like funny haha funny weird. my first glowing praise is how none of the lgbt characters even make their identities like a spoken thing, it’s just something you pick up off of them the more you read from their sections. lu’s a lovely example. It really did take me a while to notice how many times her pronouns were different depending on who was narrating. Something like that could’ve really easily just been seen as confusing and had a small ‘explanation’ somewhere in there. i am so glad that is not the case. i really did love just ‘talking to them’ for lack of a better term and getting to find out who they were and not being given it straight out.
speaking of lu she was my favorite character besides tyler and ahmir. i loved jill too but she only started really drawing my interest when her and her dad started really clashing over tyler. can i be honest i really wanted those two to work out. not jill and tyler but ahmir and tyler. ohhhh fuck yeah like speaking of the two of them. um.
tyler’s suicide straight up made me burst into tears in the middle of my day on the beach it was so dire. more specifically when ahmir is the first one to find him and he reminisces about how much of his life and childhood had been irreversibly marked by tyler.
The world, and my life inside it, shifted ever further toward him.
A new veil thrown over everything I once assumed was true. My fingers pushed through his stiff, sullied hair, and we exchanged fresh admissions and promises beneath an alien dawn. We would always be together and know each other's secrets.
^ that paragraph was the one that broke me i fear after all of the descriptions of how he fell in love with tyler over the course of their entire lives— to have it all lead up to the point where tyler has totally totally lost it and become someone he wasnt; someone ahmir couldn’t even hold respect for by the end of it.
The last thing ahmir did to tyler when he was alive was spit on him and break up with him after tyler got beat up by chucky. Granted, kinda deserved after the bullshit he put ahmir through ESPECIALLY after stealing the brick of whorl from his closet. It still felt like i was getting ripped apart physically doe.
Tyler reminds me of myself and of the worst people i have ever known and loved while in the deepest depths of addiction 🎉 its so much. It gets really overwhelming to read about how other people talk about tyler( lu constantly saying how much he terrifies her; how she’s surprised he even lasted as long as he did, arnie telling lu how fucking scary tyler is like constantly, hell— even how ahmir starts talking about tyler by the time he’s like with CINDY. THATS NOT EVEN THAT FAR IN 🥹) when you are very aware of the way people spoke of you when you were acting just as erratic, manipulative, just like….. weird in general.
It is a nasty mirror to find yourself in! it is also a really bleak way of realizing how many of the people you loved ended up the same way. Maybe not dead via that exact way; but leading their own ways there.
I was genuinely so happy that Lu got to experience a life with Eugene; when she left Arnie i was soooo ill. It was so painful!! There was really nothing i wanted more than for someone who understood Lu on that level to have been her forever. Unfortunately, when she started talking about how he was starting to flake on finding work and started steadily becoming very scared and paranoid, I immediately knew this just wasn’t going to happen. I knew it because that was me. Surviving suicide only to ruin your brain with drugs and wind up psychotic in your adult years.
I don’t blame Lu for leaving. It is very hard to live with someone like that. It is hard to be their safest place in this esoteric ass world they share and still have to deal with real life. Ive lived through many people finding this realization through me(schizophrenic) So it’s not an unfamiliar thought.
Oh, actually. Im remembering the scenes where ahmir is living with marcus in washington + working and everything. When he gets that phone call from his little sister about his mother, uses marcus’ debit card information to buy a flight home, and flies back only to call his sister and find out she never called him and doesnt even know when the last time she spoke to him was.
That REALLY got me. Idk if this is just a me thing. I have a very constant fear that i am doing/experiencing something entirely differently than how other people are.
Example: im in my bathroom and im using it. To me, i am visibly seeing the bathroom and there’s no reason why i wouldn’t think this is the bathroom. In reality i am in a public park and im peeing on the floor. I blink and i am transported from the bathroom i thought i was in to the park where everyone is staring at me horrified. That is my biggest fear. So when a similar thing happened here where he stole money from someone who helped him out at his lowest to ‘go see his mother because she is deathly ill’ only to find out… that phone call never happened and he did this for nothing and is now stuck in kinsfield again?
GOD.
I spent the last quarter of jill’s entire story with the deepest pit of my stomach after a throwaway line from Lu. When Maddie started insisting on wanting to meet jill’s family, see her hometown……… man I cried, I’ll admit it LOL. I was so frustrated. I wanted her to get out and be happy with this woman who loved her so genuinely.
I see her. Decades from now, in a familiar white room, where I had lain and she had waited beside me. The machines breathe for her. I see myself in her body. She is the me that was allowed to age, the me that wasn't already trapped out here. But I've given up on there being a story other than what they say about me now. I will lie down beside her, watching her dreams, looking for my own, until her body falls away. She can't see me as her body peels away, leaving only a sheet of curling strings. I'll never see her again but I'll always remember what she meant to me.
I think her ending is definitely my second favorite. It was so bittersweet to end on her note. I just could not stop thinking about how much of her life she missed out on. How much all of them missed out on. That’s the point, of course.
I don’t know that i really had a thought out review for this book even planned. I think i just wanted to talk about it. I still cry if i think about it randomly.
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