Leonard and Hungry Paul

by Ronan Hession

As you both change, you will periodically lose each other. You need to find each other again and—here’s the trick—instead of trying to rekindle what you had, you need to reinvent yourselves and your relationship. You have to keep starting new relationships with the same person.

It always felt strange to look at himself in the mirror, his reflection reminding him of how little of the world he took up.

Mark Baxter, BEd, was the overseeing author and hardly lifted a finger on the whole thing. Interns from his office just emailed all the changes and feedback, while Mark was away on the conference circuit, presumably sleeping with more interns, the BEd in his title providing a clue as to where he did his best work.

What I learned is that everyone in your life has an invisible number on their foreheads, which represents the number of times you will see them again. It might be zero or one, or it could be a thousand, but it’s a number. We don’t have unlimited time with people. I don’t mean that in a morbid way. It’s a lesson for us to appreciate people while we can. Don’t put people off. Don’t think you can make up the time later.

Even as she shrank down to her smallest, she could still feel the faint and plucky pulse of her devastated heart. It had continued to beat in the darkest part of her chest during her loneliest moments. Knowing that her heart was always, always alive, and did not simply come to life when she loved, gave her an invincibility.

Solitude and peace lose their specialness when they no longer stand in contrast to anything. In a busy—or at least busier—life, quiet reflection provides resonance to experience. But to deprive life of experiences deliberately and to hide from its realities was not special. It was just another form of fear that led to a life-limiting loneliness that accumulated and accumulated until it became so big that it blocked up the front door, drowned out conversations and put other people behind soundproof glass.

making big decisions was just as consequential as not making them. Either way you were committing to something. We are never entirely outside of life’s choices; everything leads somewhere.

He had always associated peace with the idea of happiness, as if it were some sort of steady state that happiness turned into when it was for real. But now he realised that peace is independent of any one feeling. The deep peace that he now felt was in a minor key. It was not blissful, but melancholy. It was a profound acceptance of things as they were, devoid of superficial preferences. The weight of effort that it took to be happy was lifted from his bones.