Contemporaneous: Chapter 59
59. A woman sits behind a table just inside the door – she’s maybe fifty, with curly silver hair, pink horn-rimmed glasses, and wearing this mauve cardigan that weighs down her shoulders until they’re sagging. I want to say she looks good for her age, but then realize I’m her age, but just don’t see myself that way. I give her my name, she consults her iPad, ticks me off, and then points me to a table in the corner with the number “8” on it. There are other tables, too, guys seated at each, nervously smoothing out their hair or their blazers or whatever, a few of them even…
Contemporaneous: Chapters 29 – 30
29. As I drive to visit my mum, what I can identify is that there’s something fundamentally wrong with my thinking. It’d be easy to doubt the reality of my experience with Luca, but it sits there, along with a week’s worth of living, in my memories, the only thing that’s hazy being the train hitting me. But I think I feel even that, muscles aching like they would a couple of days after a workout. I’m not even sure I’m not imagining that, but it’s all so commonplace, no different to any of those ordinary things we do everyday that we assign to them no importance. I don’t know,…