S.J. Watson

I want him to be happy. And I want you to be happy, too. Even if you can only find that happiness without me.

Thoughts race, as if, in a mind devoid of memory, each idea has too much space to grow and move, to collide with others in a shower of sparks before spinning off into its own distance.

I am floating, I thought, completely without anchor, at the mercy of the wind.

I closed my eyes and abandoned myself to my grief. It felt better, somehow, to be helpless. I didn't feel ashamed.

And then, when there is nothing else between us but love, we can begin to find a way to truly be together.

He forgave you though,' said Claire. 'He never held it against you, ever. All he cared about was that you lived, and that you got better. He would have given everything for that. Everything. Nothing else mattered.

There were never going to be any happy ending for me. I know that now. But that is all right. That is all right.

I want to sleep. To find a safe place somewhere, and close my eyes, and rest, like an animal. That is what I am. An animal. Living from moment to moment, day to day, trying to make sense of the world in which I find myself.

I step back further, until I feel cold tiles against my back. It is then I get the glimmer that I associate with memory. As my mind tries to settle on it, it flutters away, like ashes caught in a breeze, and I realize that in my life there is a then, a before, though before what I cannot say, and there is a now, and there is nothing between the two but a long, silent emptiness that has led me here, to me and him, in this house.

We__e constantly changing facts, rewriting history to make things easier, to make them fit in with our preferred version of events. We do it automatically. We invent memories. Without thinking. If we tell ourselves something happened often enough we start to believe it, and then we can actually remember it.

With him everything is a test, affection is measured, that given weighed against that which has been received, and the balance, more often than not, disappointing him.

I wish I hadn't. I wish I'd fought for you. I was weak and stupid.

I could see it all. The hand on the shoulder, then the hug. The mouths that find each other through the tears, the moment when guilt and the certainty that things must go no further gives way to lust and the certainty that they cannot stop.

I looked over at him, running in the distance. Another faulty, fucked-up brain in a healthy body.

Pain, or pleasure. I could not tell where one ended and the other began.

It's so difficult, isn't it? To see what's going on when you're in the absolute middle of something? It's only with hindsight we can see things for what they are.

To create myself from nothing.

What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?