Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - pg. 206

We raise our head and once more look around us, and although we see nothing particularly promising or attractive, nothing that can replace the person we long for and have lost, we begin to find it hard to sustain that longing and wonder if it was really such a loss. We're filled by a kind of retrospective laziness regarding the time when we loved or were devoted or got over-excited or anxious, and feel incapable of giving so much attention to anyone again, of trying to please them, of watching over their sleep and concealing from them what can be concealed or what might hurt them, and one finds enormous relief in that deep-rooted absence of alertness. 'I was abandoned,' we think, 'by my lover, by my friend, by my dead, so what, they all left, and the result was the same, I just had to get on with my own life. They'll regret it in the end, because it's nice to know that one is loved and sad to know one's been forgotten, and now I'm forgetting them, and anyone who dies knows more or less what fate awaits him or her. I did what I could, I held firm, and still they drifted away.' Then you quote these words to yourself: 'Memory is a tremulous finger.' And add in your own words: 'And it doesn't always succeed when it tries to point at us.' We discover that our finger can no longer be trusted, or less and less often, and that those who absorbed our thoughts night and day and day and night, and were fixed there like a nail hammered firmly in, gradually work loose and become of no importance to us; they grow blurred and, yes, tremulous, and one can even begin to doubt their existence as if they were a bloodstain rubbed and scrubbed and cleaned, or of which only the rim remains, which is the part that takes longer to remove, and then that rim, too, finally submits.