nathan’s Reviews > Open, Heaven > Status Update

And then, across the village, there came the high, metallic notes of the church bells pealing, as if the sound, as if time itself, were being pulled upwards, brightly, into the sky.

..he had gone on without me into a life freer than my own.

‘It’s okay. I know.’ I didn’t ask him what he knew, because I was terrified of having the words spoken aloud. He knew that I loved him, and all he could give me was his permission to go on loving him, unreturned. My heart felt so tight in my chest that it was painful, and I couldn’t take the look in his eyes, so deep and sympathetic and kind.

I was half pain, half ecstasy. I built the scene in his mind, feeding off his desire for her, and at first I felt uneasy, as though I was manipulating him, but he didn’t seem to find it strange, or else the strangeness excited him, because I noticed a new urgency in the way he focused on Mia’s imagined body, and after a moment he gave a long exhale, almost a sigh, and then there was the sound of his sleeping

As we walked, I could see the colours of our clothes reflected in the canal, and the image of the two of us there was like a picture, something I watched more than I watched the real thing, as though it was the image in the canal that made us real.

was a sort of mirror of me – his escape was the inverse of mine, his history the history I was trying to run from, the one he was trying to run back towards. I didn’t see how the two could ever run together, pulled as they were to opposite poles, tides governed by moons that rose and fell at different times in the same sky.

There was something in the words – the same ones he had used, I know, as if to say we knew each other then, or had done for a long while now, though neither of us had really said it before. I knew him because he

There were days when I worried that my desire for more love, more touch, was ruining the life in front of me. I could not sit in a place of wanting and still exist. Life was slipping by like water, flowing around me.

I had never seen his chest, never seen his bare shoulders. These things were left to fantasy. They were also a reminder of separation: I had to imagine them, and in imagining them I was reminded of their hiddenness, the way they were kept from me.

Perhaps I wanted to possess him by giving to him, by giving everything I could – if only to be the bringer of joy and pleasure to his door, so that, if he would not have me, at least he might not dispense with me.