Panenka

by Ronan Hession

But illness meant dependency. It was society’s last chance to push the benefits of membership. For every person who feared dying alone, there were others like Panenka who resisted the intimacy of it, the body’s loss of privacy and the final exhibition of the personality.

Humans are by nature romantic creatures. By that I don’t mean full of love: I mean that they like the idea of things more than the reality of them.

It struck him how unreliable age was as a measure of anything. All it did was count the distance from the start, when what truly mattered was the time remaining.

‘Do you know what resonance is?’ ‘Resonance?’ ‘It’s as though one person sounds a bell in their heart, and if the other person has the same bell inside them, it rings too.’

Loneliness is a torch: it can show you things about yourself.