"Your idea of love is a rather simplistic one. Love isn’t a series of isolated sensations …"
It struck me that that was just what all my experiences of love had been: a sudden surge of emotion at someone’s gaze or gesture or kiss … Radiant moments without any underlying connection, that was all the memory I had of them.
I would stretch out on the sand, take up a handful and then let it trickle through my fingers in a gentle yellow stream. I told myself that it was trickling away like time, and that it was facile to think like that and that it was pleasant having facile thoughts.
Before, I did not know what sadness was, though I knew what it was to be languorous, to have regrets and, more rarely, to feel remorse. Today it is as if I am enfolded in some silken thing, soft and enervating, that sets me apart from others.