Many times you live next door to someone for years and you know nothing about them; when you meet in the lift you say good morning or good evening; most rarely you exchange a few trivialities about the weather, as the lift goes up or down; and little else. Everyone goes on with their lives and that’s how it should be. However, from time to time, something happens that makes you discover your neighbours’ dark secrets. The other day as …
Tag: wife
She turns it again and again inside her head and for the thousandth time she is unable to reach a conclusion. Rather, she feels unable to decide. Her life hangs in the balance and she has no clue about what she will do next. She knows what she wants to do, what she would like to do, but then she thinks of the unsurmountable obstacles and she falters. She cannot do it. But how can she not do it, and …
She looks out of the window. It’s raining outside, as it is raining in her heart. She remembers an old song by Leo Sayer “It’s raining in my heart”, but then it meant nothing to her, as her life was full of sunshine, no heavy clouds on the horizon. Unfortunately, it now seems so appropriate. Forty years Forty years, she thinks. Forty years of love with a man, youthful years shared, then a life built together, the happiness of …
We crossed paths many years ago, when I was a university student of 18 and he had already finished university and was beginning his career as a researcher and University professor. A different kind of friend He was some five or six years older than me, but it made a difference at the time. We met during some holidays in Madeira, when I was experiencing one of those summer passions that came and go as fast as a tropical …
Lying on his hospital bed, he knows this is the brief moment of twilight when it is no longer day but night hasn’t yet arrived. He is dying but somehow he won’t let go. His wife of many years sits on the bed holding his hand. She speaks softly to him, but suddenly her image is not the one he sees, her voice is not the one he hears. Standing before him is another feminine figure – a slim, dark haired …
After lunch, the old patriarch sat on his reclining chair as he did every day of his nowadays so predictable life. I may be old, he thought, but I still enjoy a good meal. As he closed his eyes, he thought of the coming Christmas with some trepidation – after all this would be the first Christmas with his two great-grandchildren, and at such a lively age, both one year old! The little girl living in London, he didn’t see …
The hospital emergency is packed. The old patriarch is lying on a bed in a corridor turned into an improvised ward. Most of the patients are elderly people like him. This winter has been harsh, very cold and now rainy and damp, and flu quickly turns into pneumonia…and then the whole bloody list of diseases that came with old age goes crazy: his diabetes, his heart condition…damn old age, he thinks and he closes his eyes and tries to remember happier …
Back in the late seventies, there was a South African band called “The Rabbitt” that I loved to listen to. They had a very nice (and somewhat cynical) song called “Everybody’s cheating”. I hadn’t heard it – or even remembered it – for a long, long time, but as I was going through some old papers the title of the song was there and when I found it on Spotify it was as if I were time travelling…and as I …
