I wanted impossible things. I wanted my life with her before it all turned bad. What I had been given had been taken away and now I was even less than before.

All a person does in a moment of suffering is to suffer. There is not room for anything else.

But you learn to smother the living breathing soul, go deaf to it, and this violence to the self is what is commonly called sanity in the places where I have lived.

I wanted impossible things. I wanted my life with her before it all turned bad. What I had been given had been taken away and now I was even less than before.

In the middle of this it was good to have some moments in which whatever was left of you could sit in silence. When you could remember. When the evidence that had gathered could be sorted. And it was a difficulty if another person imagined these moments were their property. Your life got sliced from two sides like a supermarket salami until there was nothing left in the middle. You were the bits that had been given away right and left to others. Because they wanted the piece of you that belonged to them. Because they wanted more. Because they wanted passion. And you did not have it.

Everybody likes to see the loner hitched. It tells them everything is right with the world.

I was very far away. My real life had gone underground and could not be seen by anybody. The person at the surface that everybody saw was no longer me.