You Are Here

by David Nicholls

Time is a sensation that alters depending on where you are, and the cursed hours between three and five on a February afternoon lasted forever, as did the same hours in the morning, times when she had nothing to contemplate but the same circling anxieties and regrets,

It’s happening now and it’ll happen when the last human is long gone. Mighty forces beneath your feet. Nothing permanent, everything changing.

and while the kindness of a friend was a precious and touching thing, it could also feel like an imposition.

the prose fine and sturdy as a dry-stone wall,

Private, intimate, a book was something she could pull around and over herself, like a quilt.

Neither young nor old, too late to start again, too early to stop, the future simultaneously a great swathe of time but also not enough.

squinting through the perspiration that had combined with eye make-up and moisturiser to create a concoction of salt, acid and oil, a vinaigrette basically, that burnt her eyes.

People who said they were separated, not divorced, were like people who insisted that a tomato was a fruit, not a vegetable: technically correct, but on shaky ground.

‘No, I get that. I think it’s that k – it’s like x, it’s quite racy. Mike’s a DJ but Michael’s a saint.’

She had never quite lost the habit of taking the weather personally.

because niceness was something that was both rare and also hard to talk about.

Again, the presumption of envy galled her more than envy itself.

Fiction’s just there, but poetry you have to seek out and there’s always this voice in my head saying, Oh, look at you, with your little slim volume.

Beards, for instance, were meant to be metropolitan, and Michael looked like someone who’d spent a year filming puffins in the Hebrides.

She had not lied except about the most important thing: how it had all felt.

Was her company a pleasant surprise or was she the party guest who won’t go home?

It was what a New Year’s Eve ought to be but never is, sentimental and munificent, full of hope and generalised love.

and perhaps solitude is more frightening when something is snatched away.