Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the truth, maybe I didn't want things to turn abstract, but I felt I should say it, because this was the moment to say it, because it suddenly dawned on me that this was why I had come, to tell him 'You are the only person I'd like to say goodbye to when I die, because only then will this thing I call my life make any sense. And if I should hear that you died, my life as I know it, the me who is speaking with you now, will cease to exist.

No, No one likes being alone. But I've learned how to live with it.

Time is always the price we pay for the unlived life.

And just as you utter these words, I know with unshakable certainty that those few minutes when we walk hand in hand together are, even in a dream, more real and better than anything I'd ever known in life, and that I would be lying if I called what I've been doing all these years living.

..time is always the price we pay for the unlived life.

What does this say about the life you've lived, then?''Part of it— just part of it —was a coma, but I prefer to call it a parallel life. It sounds better. Problem is that most of us have— live, that is—more than two parallel lives.

I couldn't understand how boldness and sorrow, how you're so hard and do you really care for me? could be so thoroughly bound together. Nor could I begin to fathom how someone so seemingly vulnerable, hesitant, and eager to confide so many uncertainties about herself could, with one and the same gesture, reach into my pants with unabashed recklessness and hold on to my cock and squeeze it.

Or were we like people who have died before their time and are given a second chance by some minor deity, but with so many provisos that the new life feels like a deferred death?

Our star life, yours with mine. As someone said over dinner once, each of us is given at least nine versions of our lives, some we guzzle, others we take tiny, timid sips from, and some our lips never touch.