“I felt a coldness start to build inside me. A numbing cold like you feel in the dentist’s chair, the kind you’re powerless to stop. I couldn’t cry. I could feel the tears damned inside my chest but there was no channel to my eye."
Here, Amelia exploits Repression when confronting the actuality of her parents’ demise in a fire. The coldness is illustrative of her emotional agony which freezes all her pleasure and dynamism. The absence of tears validates that she wants emphatically to overwhelm her sorrow.
“Frank tried to be another John. But he wasn’t built of the same stuff, physically or mentally, and he only succeeded in getting himself into trouble. No one ever feared my brother Frank. In those schools you learned to tell the difference between courage and bravado, toughness and a pose, and no one believed in Frank’s imitation of his brother. That knowledge just made him angrier. Made him act out more. Made him separate from all of us. He sulked and his surliness made him even more of a caricature and made him try even harder to live up to what he thought a One Sky man should be. He got mean instead of tough and, watching him through those years, I knew that the river, the fire, and the cold ran through him, drove him, sent him searching for a peg to hang his life on.”
John is Frankie’s categorical, compelling Looking Glass Self. John exemplifies all the traits which Frankie desires to espouse so that he can command deference from all the other people who dreaded John. Frankie’s performance hinders him from constructing his ideal, unpretentious Self. The peg recapitulates Frankie’s candid Self Concept which is characterized by unfeelingness.
“Everyone has a mourning ground, a place where the course of a life turned, changed, altered, or disappeared forever. It could be a house, a park, or just a place on the pavement where the wrong words were said, the worst choice made, or fateful action taken. Our spirits are linked to these places forever and when our sorrow’s deep enough we return to them again and again to stand in our pain, reliving the memory, mumbling clumsy prayers that we might be offered a chance to change what happened, bend time so we could choose again. But it never hap-pens. The shadowed ones just keep on doing that after death, returning to those places where their wounds are buried, hoping against hope that something in the walls or ground might emerge to save them.”
Amelia settles on the idea that she is bound to stay in the streets considering how contributing they have been in shaping her lifecycle. After her detox, Amelia contemplates the repercussions of the streets on her reality. Amelia’s soul is explicitly joined to the street; hence, it would be unviable for her to live in another quarter other than the street. Psychoanalytically, the street bids Amelia a superlative milieu for Regression for it revives all the memories that she formed throughout her presence in the street. Regression empowers Amelia to tend to her timeworn psychological wounds.
