And Then Some Days You Wake Up

…and Emma Felt Another Small Portion Of Her Soul Fall Away.

She Used To Pride Herself On Her Refusal To See Two Sides Of An Argument, But Increasingly She Accepts That Issues Are More Ambiguous And Complicated Than She Once Thought.

Occasionally, Very Occasionally, Say At Four O’clock In The Afternoon On A Wet Sunday, She Feels Panic-stricken And Almost Breathless With Loneliness. Once Or Twice She Has Been Known To Pick Up The Phone To Check That It Isn’t Broken. Sometimes She Thinks How Nice It Would Be To Be Woken By A Call In The Night: ‘get In A Taxi Now’ Or ‘i Need To See You, We Need To Talk’. But At The Best Of Times She Feels Like A Character In A Muriel Spark Novel – Independent, Bookish, Sharp-minded, Secretly Romantic.

...emma Morley Wasn't Such A Paragon Either: Pretentious, Petulant, Lazy, Speechifying, Judgmental. Self-pitying, Self Righteous, Self-important, All The Selfs Except Self-confident, The Quality That She Had Always Needed The Most.

She Had Reached A Turning Point. She No Longer Believed That A Situation Could Be Made Better By Writing A Poem About It.