Paromita’s Reviews > The Morning Star > Status Update

As if breathing were something that occurred in defiance and the natural condition, for infant and elderly alike, was not to be breathing, the breathless state being an equilibrium to which they were naturally drawn.

Now it was me who lived there, but the thought was the same, the only difference being that now it was my own life I could see from afar, my own life that became small. That I wasn’t all there was.

Or rather, I trusted her, but a person’s loyalty to their partner is so often greater than to their friends.
It was just the way it was.

this was my city, it was where I’d grown up and spent my entire working life—but all sense of familiarity and belonging seemed suddenly to have dissolved. I wasn’t supposed to be there, I reasoned, and so I felt detached from it all.

People disappeared into their own lives and conflicts, and in doing so they lost perspective, not only on where they were, but also on who they were, and who they had been or could become.
But stepping sideways in one’s own life was well nigh impossible.

In those days I’d thought that was how life was going to be. We squandered our time and thoughts, and only when it was over did I understand that it had all been unique and would never return...When we’re young we think there’s more to come, that this is only the beginning, whereas in fact it’s all there is, and what we have now, and barely even think about, will soon be the only thing we ever had.

It was impossible to say exactly when the illness took over, it was more of a slow slide along the scale, from good cheer and well-being to something that pulled her further and further away from us, and we went along with it, passively accepting a situation which from the outside wasn’t acceptable at all, because we weren’t on the outside, we were inside...

Childhood was a time for running around immersed in life, youth was the discovery of the peculiar sweetness of death.
Now it was August I liked best. Nothing odd about that either, I thought; I was in midlife, at that juncture in time when things come to completion, when slowly and steadily life’s increasing abundance starts to stagnate, on the cusp of its beginning to wane, to tail off into quite as slow a decline.