Apologies for my language. It’s hard not to get carried away when I think about this stuff. You see what I’m getting at hopefully: I am a passionate man. Passion is historically connected with suffering, most of all in Christianity, but in many other religions less known in the West, too. Passion as well as ambition propels me, and this is why I have prospered, relatively speaking, surviving that critical three-year window. I have remained relatively sane. But rabies will eventually hit among the pick of the pack too, when your breed is rammed in a small enough cage, dog on top of dog. I worry that after ten years in the city it’s begun to chip away at me too. I’m getting weary, Lili, which is why I write to you. I have known I wanted to meet you since the first time I saw you. I look at you every day, when I come in for lunch, but I have never had the guts to do anything about it. Asking the pretty waitress for her number is one of those things we, alienated new humans, seem to have forgotten how to do. This incapability (this condition of stillness) this is what I mean when I say my current life has begun to frighten me. When your lovely photograph appeared at the top of my screen I was frozen still. I felt in an instant I had a duty not to let my life slip by. It was the first time I’d had the courage to think those words so clearly. From the computer screen, I felt like you were looking right at me. So I wrote to you.

Your Cloud

SOUP

Ruth

Now

Life trundles on and I am keeping at it. March still feels a long way away, but I know better: spring will be here when we least expect it. Time to get started on a big clean. Like my mother, I keep the flat tidy in its well-worn corners. My flat, all mine. I cheer myself up: at least it is done, at least he’s seeing someone else. This is final. I cannot contact him. I don’t know where he’s living and, after I saw him with that girl, I deleted his mobile number in horror. I don’t regret it.

Where is he living? Certainly not in Cornwall. And certainly not with her, who looks young enough to be living at home. Probably in some bachelor bedsit with fittings chosen by others, where the bathroom mirror hangs so high that he can see his bald patch in full. I can picture the black mould growing in the cracks of his shower tiles. I, on the other hand, have a grown-up flat to tend to – a grown-up life. I lack none of the necessary skills for survival. I can do minor repairs, cure a variety of ailments. I have plenty of fresh water. I can cook soup.