"He began to ask me #questions, as though he had learned to remind himself to do so, and I wondered what or who had taught him that lesson, which many people never learn.  I said that I lived in #London, having very recently moved from the #house in the #countryside where I had lived alone with my #children for the past three years, and where for the seven years before that we had lived together with their father.  It had been, in other words, our #family #home, and I had stayed to watch it become the #grave of something I could no longer definitively call either a #reality or #illusion. "... It was difficult to study my #neighbor's face from the adjacent seat but in the light-infected darkness it had become a #landscape of peaks and crevices, from the centre of which rose the extraordinary hook of his nose, casting deep ravines of shadow on either side so that I could barely see his eyes... I said in response to his question, to give the reasons why the #marriage had ended: among other things a marriage is a system of #belief, a #story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious.  What was #real, in the end, was the loss of the house, which had become the geographical location for things that had gone absent and which represented, I supposed, the #hope that they might one day return.  To move from the house was to declare, in a way, that we had stopped waiting; we could no longer be found at the usual number, the usual address." from my #reading, #rachelcusk #outline #contemporarylit #fiction #literature #britishliterature #writing #novel (at Mott Haven, Bronx)
