Leonard and Hungry Paul

by Ronan Hession

‘The short run can often be full of feelings,’

it’s hard not to hurt people.

Even doing nothing, you can end up hurting people. It seems that on the question of whether you are damned, there is an ‘x’ in both the ‘do’ and ‘don’t’ columns.

We live in an age of cacophony. Everyone talking and thinking out loud, with no space or oxygen left for quiet statements and silence.

he could see that 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.

The never-again-ness of that thought played through him and chimed with the sad inner harmony he had awoken to.

he had found a little shelf of peace within himself,

Anyone can say something beautiful in the moment. Anyone can deliver the right line. But that’s not real. That doesn’t prove anything. What matters is what a person is really like. What matters is what a person is prepared to reveal to you in real time in the real world, when there is no soundtrack in the background and no games going on. I care for you very much, but I’m not scared to be by myself. I can’t perform for you,

‘you get to the stage where you realise that if you don’t give your own life some air and sunlight, it becomes this sad little place inside you.

Sometimes that happens, he thought, the motive only revealing itself after the fact.