The tube station was closed, so I stood at the unfamiliar bus stop in the rain watching my hands go blue. The people around me pressed and swayed in time to the passing vehicles, ignoring each other with drained, escapist eyes.
Through the downpour there came a voice, so unexpected I missed the meaning of the words. "Sorry?"
"I said, 'Would you like to borrow my umbrella?'" Lilting voice, green eyes like open arms.
I gratefully accepted, huddled under one of those compact umbrellas that offer precious little refuge from a downpour. But it's the thought that counts.
It all seemed so bright and hopeful that morning. We both took the day off, took in the sights, ate at Garfunkel's. A bus back to her suburb of falling leaves and Gothic houses.
I don't suppose we actually fell in love. It's only now that I realise that we came together like wounded animals, recognising a need, yet knowing that we could only offer destruction and the emptiness at the core of our souls.
Our love so swiftly became pitiable. I pity myself. I'm desperate to not be without her. I thought she offered liberation, but my life is still ruled by the grim monarchs of old - fear, self-doubt, loneliness.
Loneliness? That night, when we slept together, I was the loneliest I'd ever been. There were just too many ghosts to exorcise.
Now she dominates my horizons and my every idle thought. The future is dark and unknowable, the past untrustworthy. She has so infected my life that there is only 'now' - only the terrible fears that brought us together and the loneliness that keeps us there.
Perhaps we just got addicted to the arguments, blind to any other possibility. The grotesque thrill of it all - that pit-of-your-stomach feeling like on a roller coaster. Everything else a blur. Hating yourself, but knowing that it's too late to turn back. You just can't stop yourself - you've become someone new. And you scream at the results, half-reflected in a mirror.
Take the other day. We were shopping together, as we do most Saturdays. Why do we torture ourselves? She knows I'd rather be anywhere else, that it's only her presence that draws me on. I'm like a clock in her hands, and she's tightening, tightening all the time. And just when I'm about to explode I look over at her and know that she's my only source of escape, of hope. I rely on her to the exclusion of all else.
But eventually her beauty is not enough to contain me. "How many pages in that book?" she asked.
"Do you mean sheets or pages?" I queried, deliberately obtuse.
We spent the rest of the day circling each other, looking for weak points, wounded areas, places to attack. We continue playing our games across the surface of our lives, sending daggers into tender, exposed flesh the moment our weaknesses are revealed.
We're no longer in love. It's enough that we exist.