What happens to a person in solitude?

I want to shake off a day full of words and meanings. Not that they're superfluous, just that I don't need them anymore.

The Cut Line, by Carolina Pihelgas, follows a young Estonian woman's reclamation of self during the long hot summer after she leaves a fourteen-years-long relationship. Liine was 18 when she met Tarmo; when it's revealed that he is fifteen years older than her, the toxic control he held over her becomes apparent.

What if he's right that no one else would have a use for me. Doubt is like a cobweb — very delicate, but when you touch it, it clings to your fingers. Gray and sticky.

I can picture cut lines: wounds from the knife the narrator brandishes in her imagination, against herself or her ex (the epigraph is a line from Ariana Harwicz; for more knives and toxicity see Die, My Love). Or the cut line is how she mows the grass as short as possible. Metaphorically, it's a line between past and future. It's the line Liine draws that delineates her self from others.

We feel the tone shift from despondency toward occasional langour and back again.

The sheet metal that covers the woodpile is rattling the wind. The hooded crow sways on the oak tree and caws. The quiet murmur of the clover and golden silence of the mayweed. They sing inside me as if my innermost being is the center of everything, both living and dead.

Liine is staying at the family cottage farm. She works the garden, the land. She becomes attuned to the insects. The sound of helicopters and gunshots at the nearby military base is a constant reminder that there's a world outside, that there's a war in Ukraine. Her feed relays extreme heat, water shortages, famine, hurricanes. She scrolls articles about climate anxiety. While a relationship breakup may be a universal experience, a timeless story even (one remarkable if negative effect of this book is how it managed to permeate my mood, stirring up bad relationship memories of my own.), the backdrop is very today.

The language is beautiful. This is not a plot-driven novel. Liine's mother and sister provide counterpoints, in their living situations, how they process the past, what they value. But Liine is determined to find her own way. She comes across a stash of letters belonging to her great-aunt, which open her eyes to the possibility of other, affirmative ways of being. Liine's evolution over the summer is subtle and authentic. 

And then I'm in a place where nothing moves forward anymore, everything only goes backward, turns back on itself, tells me about the meaninglessness of my existence. Reality is a snake coiling up, but there's no room for me here. I'm excluded from all living things, from all breathing things. Without other people, do I even exist? What happens to a person deep down, right at the bottom, in solitude?

I breathe. I breathe. Is it possible that here in this old house, far from everything, I could turn into something else, into a plant, say? Doesn't that make me like something that's poked its head out of the ground; something pale green that's stretched out, caught some sun, maybe even managed to grow some flowers, but not borne fruit? And is then cut down and trampled to pieces. Don't I have roots, then, somewhere deeper still? I should just go back to bed, curl up under the blanket and cry a bit. I need to stay beneath the soil, in the ground, here in a safe remote place until I find the strength within me to sprout new shoots.