Christy’s Reviews > Insomnia: A Guide to, and Consolation for, the Restless Early Hours > Status Update

we hadn't realised that the holiday we went on when we were seven still meant so much to us....; we'd not properly grasped how frightened we are of being abandoned by a particular friend (in the dream it didn't occur to them that we couldn't ski and they raced off down the mountain without us).

you can be loved apart from your achievements and merits, you can be precious to another person just because you exist. And this opens the strangest possibilities: your own capacity to be generously tender to another, even when they don't much deserve it. You may often feel quite far from love but, as you remember the warmest moments of childhood, you realize again how much you want and need it.

The memories are not necessarily significant in and of themselves, but they are videos and overwhelming in their immediacy

There was a lot going on in my life and maybe I was frightened that this could be serious and I wasn’t ready for it. It’s mad, but I think of you a lot still. In my head you are still someone central: you’re in all the chapters of the autobiography of the life I never led.

There is so much material in our minds that we seldom visit in our waking hours.