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Fantasy: V’s dead. No one close to him, of course, thinks to tell me. Finally, a day or two later, R calls: ‘H, I’ve got some very bad news…’ Odd feeling that he may as well be dead, he may as well never have existed. His existence is purely intellectual. I can’t even write him a letter. Because he…

Reading an old diary. I cannot remember, even in the thinnest or most fragmentary moment, how it felt to ‘love’ the man I was in love with, back then. All that hideous torment, everyone suffering, and for WHAT? What would I remember of NOW? This one works, steadily, quietly. His mind does not take …

The urge to blame V. To say, ‘He is selfish. He wants to have everything, for the world to revolve around him. He will never choose me. He should never have begun this.’ The cowardice of this urge. The old longing to play the victim. What’s required here is a bracing of the self. After all, ‘we’ ‘l…

At Mum and Dad’s I sat sideways on my chair, staring out the window. Dad said, affectionately (for him), ‘What are you thinking about, Helen?’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘just the meaning of the universe.’ A true answer would have been, ‘I’ve found the love of my life, and he’s married to somebody else.’

During the wedding ceremony I asked myself why the simple hopes of these promises are so impossible when the complications of life fall on them like a collapsing wall. I do not understand marriage. V is always talking about symmetry but we are not symmetrical at all. I am offering everything and he…