She leaned towards me and kissed me on the lips. It was just a peck, but a peck on the lips was not just a peck. 'What was that for?' I asked.I could just about see her smile in the moonlight. It wasn't a flirtatious smile. It was a plain, matter-of-fact one. 'For you to have something else to occupy your mind.

Flowers, after love, must have been the best advert planet Earth had going for it.

It wasn’t just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.

I did not know how to be me, my strange and unusual self, without her. I had tried it, of course. I had existed whole years without her, but that was all it had been. An existence. A book with no words.

She was the stars and the heavens and the oceans. There was nothing but that single fragment of time, and this bud of love we had planted inside it. And then, at some point after it started, the kiss ended, and I stroked her hair, and the church bells rang in the distance and everything in the world was in alignment.

It may seem strange, falling in love with someone because of a gesture, but sometimes you can read an entire person in a single moment. The way you can study a grain of sand and understand the universe. Love at first sight might or might not be a thing, but love in a single moment is.

Don't ever be afraid of telling someone you love them. There are things wrong with your world, but an excess of love is not one.

So love is about finding the right person to hurt you?

So love is about finding the right person to hurt you?”“Pretty much.