The Hunting Party

That’s what happens when you have known someone for such a long time. You see all their faults, yes, but you know their best qualities too

the dark windows like blank eyes.

This man with whom I have spent so much of my life, with whom I have shared a house and a bed, beside whom I have slept most nights. How little it takes, I think, just some shadows, really, to make ourselves unknown to each other.

All work and no play, Katie – have you ever heard that one?

New Year’s Eve. The loneliest night of the year, even if you’re with people.

But the horror of the experience never leaves you. It is always a shock – a profound, existential shock – to be confronted with the inanimate object that was once a person. A person so recently thinking, feeling, seeing, reduced to so much cold flesh

Sometimes solitude is the only way to regain your sanity.

But that’s the thing about old friends, isn’t it? Sometimes they don’t even realise that they no longer have anything in common.

The glass eyes have the effect some paintings have; they seem to follow you wherever you go, staring balefully down.