Four be the things I’d have been better without: love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.

In this epigrammatic line, Parker compresses a lifetime of rueful self-assessment into a mock “inventory” of regrets. The list mixes the grand and the trivial—love and doubt alongside freckles—creating her characteristic comic deflation: emotional suffering and existential uncertainty are treated with the same dry shrug as an unwanted physical trait. “Curiosity” suggests both intellectual restlessness and the impulse to pry into experiences that later wound; “love” and “doubt” point to the costs of attachment and self-questioning. The sing-song, almost nursery-rhyme cadence (“Four be the things…”) heightens the irony, as if a childlike form could contain adult disillusionment.