I bear the physical scars of my emotional treachery. They give me away like a secret language; a confession in hieroglyphics.
It is more or less ten years ago to the day that I left as a young man in search of adventure abroad. A day like today, early in April, when the sun is as clear as the air is crisp, the land rejoicing in a recent wetting. An invigorating, hope-stuffed feeling pervades on days like these, charged, when the world has learnt once again to shed its dungeonesque beginnings, and offers us instead, illuminations. I thought the world held endless possibility....
Before long I had made a series of conscious decisions which were to affect my life in a way I could never have predicted.
The calendar hanging from the back of the door reminds me of two crucial despondencies; the impossibility of leisure, and the magnitude of time when it is lived at the level of seconds. A bookshelf is crammed to the hilt with rejected books, ragged and discarded with troubled spines. A collection of ghost stories, a journal of sea voyages, the Pilgrim’s Progress, a dictionary of biology. They gather dust and, wedged together, form an impenetrable stack of misery, forgotten words left, irreligiously, with a forgotten man.