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[...] There are times when we regard loneliness as a punishment: we are like children left alone in a dark room while the adults carry on chattering and enjoying themselves next door. But one day we too grow up to be adults and learn that loneliness—genuine, fully conscious solitude—is not a punish…

[...] You know how it is: you wake up in the morning like an asthmatic, gasping for air. You put a hand out in the dark seeking another hand. You can’t understand how the other person is no longer there, nearby, in the next house or the next street. You walk down the street but the other person is …

I understood that this was the truth and that it was carved in stone. Neither of them was a liar. I began to feel sick with fear, with the shock. I felt generally unwell. There could be nothing worse than the news that they had never spoken since. That they had remained silent for twelve years: tha…

[...] There was simply this woman on the other side of the tracks, going about her business, waiting and aging, as I was … and there I was on my side, not knowing why my life lacked something, why it was unbearable, or what to make of the feeling that haunted my days and nights, those feelings that…

This was not the room of some kittenish little flirt who inherits her mistress’s silk stockings and discarded clothes, secretly sprays herself with Madam’s French perfume, and makes eyes at the master of the house. The woman facing me was not the normal household demon, the lower-orders lover, the …