When he first saw her, it was by accident - in the rain, striding, determined, certain. She glared at the rain that fell around her, almost daring it to her touch her.

He almost dropped the stack of books he needed ro reshelve - not because she was beautiful, not because she was charming, but becaue she looked so devestatingly angry.

The rain wasn't listening to her; her hair was flattened against her head, her clothing glistening, almost shining against the dark sky. Sun seemed to be attempting to get through - maybe if she glared hard enough at the...

Smile for the camera

He was of an age when he knew he didn't want snatches of reality - no, no, reality was already all around him, he'd had more than enough reality.

He wanted a false joy, the kind of happiness only captured in an instamatic, the image that would was all at once meaningless and meaningful.

In later life he'd write for hours on end about the false smiles that don't reach the eyes, about what those expressions really mean, what's really going on beneath the surface, the realities that can be extracted from the falsehoods.

But -...

"I'm having no part in this. I'm having nothing to do with any of it. Because it's wrong. You're wrong. This entire thing is...it's wrong. It's just...wrong."

"Have you always been good with words?" He sauntered closer, pale fingers tracing my cheek, my neck. "You're relying quite heavily on that word. Wrong. Have you thought about what it really means? How damning it truly is? I don't think you have."

I hated the feel of his fingers across my skin, hated the jolt that had run straight through me, hated the tingling, hated the - I hated it.

He was...

We are there. We are in the shadows, in the gaps, in the spaces between words. We are in every moment where you pull away, where discretion replaces narrative, we are there.

We are there in the knowledge that you do not write all things that happen, we are there, waiting in the wings, filling in the gaps, in the spaces.

You did not write us - you never write us, nobody writes us (and who would read us, who would read every banal moment, every second, what soul could stand the painful inevitability of one moment following the next...

Starvation.

He'd heard the word before, used it - but he hadn't known what it meant. He knew that now. He had no idea of what it really meant, not until now, not until this moment (but he knew it would continue to get worse until he could eat, of course it would, that gnawing inside would only get worse)

His vision was failing, he was dizzy - he needed something, needed to find something to eat, or he would -

He knew it with a painful clarity. He would die.

Again.

It had been bad enough the first time...

It was not a world in which it was advisable to take risks.

It could be argued - had been, by a few scholars, in the deep and distant past, a more romantic age - that risks were always inadvisable, that this was what made them risks in the first place.

But those scholars didn't live here, they didn't live now, they were from a world of chivalry and knights and heroism.

They were not in a world where you were burned if you were caught.

There were marks all over her arms - his, too, they sat beside one...

"When I was 12, I went to sea."

I looked up blankly. "Went to see what?"

"No. The sea. Big blue wet thing. You may know it as an ocean."

"No need for sarcasm." I muttered. "Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why did you go to sea? Especially at 12. Other people go to the zoo. Or to the pictures. Or they go and visit the sea, they do not - unless that's what you mean? I'm going to start telling people I went to sea at 7. I'm sure I did. Probably got sunburnt or almost drowned or got eaten by...

He hadn't wanted the light there.

She had insisted - there was light on her, light on her voice, lifting her up, letting them all see her. He was playing too (had a solo during one of the songs, actually) so why shouldn't they see him?

He'd tried to protest that it wasn't traditional, and she'd just given him one of those looks, the one that made him certain that if ever (...when) she did get signed the record label wouldn't be able to force her into one of those moulds they seemed so fond of.

He'd stood his ground,...

When he said he'd take me far away, to a world I'd never seen, I had expected more than this.

"You're just seeing the scaffolding."

"What is there that isn't scaffolding? It's...there's nothing else there. It's hollow. It's broken."

He covered my eyes with his hands, pointed me in a direction and hissed "walk" in my ear.

I had presumed this was going to be a date. Clearly I was incorrect.

I could feel the ground beneath my feet alter, and suddenly everything felt different - I was enclosed, and yet not enclosed at all (there was light spilling in,...

Taste was one of those things that was meant to be very personal, and yet everyone seemed to recognise bad taste.

The joke may have been ill-timed, but she maintained that it wasn't in "bad taste" - soon finding herself in the minority (one, in fact).

Fine. Fine, fine, fine - he would've laughed, if he'd been there. Then again, him not being there was the entire point.

He would've laughed at that, too.

It was a nice, warm day, and that was ridiculous - funerals were meant to be full of rain and the dark and thunder and the...