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.

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.

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

When you think you are in love, you don't want to know about the things that could end it.

In the presence of their love I sensed my lonliness, and I understood for a moment, clearly, that deep and basic human desire for companionship at depth.

What passes relentlessly through the years is blood, and time; all the bitterness or warmth along the way is almost incidental. Even blood gets forgotten eventually, bleached into myth which are bleached of all colour into ashes of myth.

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.