You're beautiful, but you're somewhere else. That's okay. I can handle that. But we won't continue as friends, not just now. I like you as a lover, not a friend.

Love could be fractured and serve different purposes, and that intense love could be divided, between people just as easily as between moments of time.

From time to time it has struck me that as a writer, I've somehow managed to live my life as I had long ago dreamt of doing, based on the Tintin paradigm: on my toes, travelling, senses attentuated, everything just adventure and exploration, curiosity and problem-solving.

Some people are attracted to sickness, to the kind of madness where sparks fly off the head, to the incoherence of despair, masked by nervous energy, which winds up looking like bewildered joy.

Comfort is beauty muted by heroin. Sadness is beauty drained by lack of it.

Imperceptibly, more time passes when I'm not remembering our every moment together, not recreating our every conversation, re-imagining our love-making. It is immeasurably sad.

And I come to realise that all my small todays, the way I act, will lead into my tomorrows.