a writer

"A train ride with someone you met yesterday. The smell of diesel fuel in carriage air. You look sideways at her face, you’re not even sure you like her. The plain fact is she looks more grown up than you. Her house is cold and needs work. She has a kid. She says things like, “I’ve always got by on my wits.” That’s exciting but eventually you interpret it as a judgement. Later you see that’s how she lives her life, as a judgement, as an ideological act. It’s too forceful. It’s too blunt. Worse, it doesn’t work. She’s just as compromised and vulnerable as you. Later still the pathos of that hits you, but by then she’s long gone and you are too.

I’m not looking for her."

-- M. John Harrison