It’s the small decisions, the ones that slip themselves into your day unnoticed, the ones that wrap their weight in insignificance. These are the decisions that bury you.

You can see the fracture lines in people sometimes, if you search hard enough. You can see where they’ve broken and tried to mend themselves.

I think the hardest part of losing anyone is that you still have to live with the same scenery. It’s just the person you are used to isn’t a part of it any more, and all you notice are the gaps where they used to be. It feels as though, if you concentrated hard enough, you could find them again in those empty spaces. Waiting for you.

Sometimes, you go through an experience in life that slices into the very bones of who you are, and two different versions of yourself will always sit either side of it, like bookends.

Everyone ages, Cyril.” Jack used his most reasonable voice. “On the outside, maybe. But on the inside, I’m the same person I was sixty years ago.” He jabbed at his chest, to show us where his insides are. “It’s just the packaging that’s changed.

It’s always the small decisions that change a life.

Now we were old. Now we were different people, and it felt as though everything we went through had happened to someone else, and we had just stood and watched it all from the future.

There is something special about a coastal morning. The day seems to have so much more potential when there’s a seaside attached to it. Perhaps it’s the brightness from the water, scrubbing everything clean like a front step, ready for you to start again.

Do we?’ I said. It didn’t take them long to undo my life. I had spent eighty years building it, but within weeks, they made it small enough to fit into a manila envelope and take along to meetings. They kidnapped it. They hurried it away from me when I least expected, when I thought I could coat myself in old age and be left to it. A door doesn’t sound the same when you close it for the last time, and a room doesn’t look the same when you know you’ll never see it again.

I waited. I had discovered that, sometimes, if you held on to the silence, people couldn’t stop themselves from filling it up.