Contemporaneous: Chapters 42 – 44
42. The phone rings. I almost don’t answer it, because I think it’ll be Lana, launching another salvo – part of me worries she’ll show up on my doorstep to continue this, although she’s only ever done that when she incontrovertibly knows she’s the one who’s fucked up, and wants to be conciliatory. You can place those visits along with Halley’s Comet. And my head’s raw. My ears are raw. I’m raw. Like I’m recoiling in expectation of some inexorable, scathing deconstruction of all my inadequacies. I wonder if this is how tortured prisoners, where the expectation now is just as horrifying as the experience itself. Fuck that. What I…
Contemporaneous: Chapters 31 – 32
31. Now that Lana is staying over Sunday unfolds differently, as I wake earlier, then make us breakfast, and we sit together and watch one of the morning breakfast shows. She asks me what I’ve got on for the day, and I tell her my Sunday usuals, such as washing and shopping. I can hear her thinking, wanting to do something together, and sure enough she suggests an afternoon walk to Peggy’s, a café that’s reached through a rural thirty-minute walk down by murky river or other. So that’s the day set. After I see her out for the morning, I shower, throw all my stuff into the washing machine,…