Nigel Jay Cooper

Memory is an artist, an impressionist. She adds colour, sound, smell and emotion to events at her whim. She adds, subtracts and embellishes until the event she started documenting is quite unrecognisable to the others who also experienced it, but at the same time, is more truthful to the owner of the memory. There is no reality. There are only impres- sions of past events, made by a million selves, all interacting with each other, vying for superiority. Reality doesn__ exist, perhaps in the end, that__ my only truth.

Maybe that__ the way of love. It doesn__ wait to be invited in, and it won__ be coerced. It gently creeps under your skin, a mild itch at first, not giving itself away in case you scratch it and cause an infection. But then it sinks in deeper, getting into your bloodstream. It travels. By the time it reaches your brain and you__e aware of the infection, it__ already taken over your heart. In Natalie__ experience, love is anything but innocent. It__ a captor, a guard, imprisoning you in the clutches of another, knitting the fabric of your own life to somebody else__, whether you like it or not.

Emotions don__ arrive intact. Shards injure you incrementally, so small at first you don__ notice them. Over time, the damage builds and one day you realise the nicks and cuts have become gaping wounds. Worse still, they__e become the very thing that defines you.