Sometimes, the things that are the most real only happen in one's imagination, Oscar, she said. We only remember what never really happened.

I knew then that I would devote every minute we had left together to making her happy, to repairing the pain I had caused her and returning to her what I never known how to give her. These pages will be our memory until she drows her last breath in my arms and I take her forever and escape at last to a place where neither heaven nor hell will ever be able to find us.

Remember me, even if it's only in a corner and secretly. Don't let me go.

I could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. It was the early summer of 1945, and we walked through the streets of a Barcelona trapped beneath ashen skies as dawn poured over Rambla de Santa Monica in a wreath of liquid copper.

Aryami Bose's home had been closed up for years, inhabited only by books and paintings, but the spectre of thousands of memories imprisoned between its walls still permeated the house.

Now he knew that any memories he might cherish during the last years of his life would be only fictions from a biography he'd never lived.

It's the only thing that brings us together now, you see. Memories. We make so many mistakes in life, young lady, but we only realize this when old age creeps up on us.

I handed the photo back to her. The caretaker gazed at it as if it were a lucky charm, a return ticket to her youth.