I'd Thought I'd Live With My Wife,

Phone Calls Like Ours Only Happen When You've Spent Several Years Hurting And Being Hurt, Until Every Work You Utter Or Hear Becomes Coded And Loaded, As Complicated And Full Of Subtext As A Bleak And Brilliant Play.

But The Internet Had Changed Everything: Nobody Was Forgotten Anymore.

My Friends Don't Seem To Be Friends At All But People Whose Phone Numbers I Haven't Lost.

I'm Coming To London Next Week, By The Way, In Unhappy Circumstances. Are We Getting On Fine As We Are? Or Would You Like A Drink?

I Used To Think--and Given The Way We Ended Up, Maybe I Still Do--that All Relationships Need The Kind Of Violent Shove That A Crush Brings, Just To Get You Started And To Push You Over The Humps. And Then, When The Energy From That Shove Has Gone And You Come To Something Approaching A Halt, You Have To Look Around And See What You've Got. It Could Be Something Completely Different, It Could Be Something Roughly The Same, But Gentler And Calmer, Or It Could Be Nothing At All.