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.

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

If time stood still, and we could choose the time, the best time, then love without pain would be all I know.

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.

For the Tintin books were my emotional universe. To read them felt quite simply like being loved: in advance and by an entire world of pure possibility, my future. But to write to the author was to reach out for the lover. Even today, the power of reading one remains visceral: each book acts as a form of transportation, not just to the emotional landscape of this first literary love affair but to very specific memories.

Drought brings out the worst in us and it's easy to hate your fellow human beings.

Everything comes to nothing in the end, I suppose. Or at least, nothing happens exactly the way we imagine it.