My dreams are crowded with people, as though to compensate for the solitariness of my waking hours.

By way of this unprecedented, unbridled literary promiscuity, I have made some pleasant discoveries.

My ears become my conduit to the world. In the darkness I listen—to thrillers, to detective novels, to romances; to family sagas, potboilers and historical novels; to ghost stories and classic fiction and chick lit; to bonkbusters and history books. I listen to good books and bad books, great books and terrible books; I do not discriminate. Steadily, hour after hour, in the darkness I consume them all.

Friendship plants itself as a small unobtrusive seed; over time, it grows thick roots that wrap around your heart. When a love affair ends, the tree is torn out quickly, the operation painful but clean. Friendship withers quietly, there is always hope of revival. Only after time has passed do you recognise that it is dead, and you are left, for years afterwards, pulling dry brown fibres from your chest.

Each small accommodation of my physical environment is an admission that things are not improving, that this is not some fleeting horror, that perhaps...But that is the unthinkable thought.

But for the most part, people - of the right kind - are good. For them I put on my corset of cheerfulness, a solid serviceable garment. It holds in the bulgings and oozings of emotion, and soon I find they are, temporarily, stilled.

And all my ethical reasoning crumbles to ash in the sheer fact of his presence. Because together, even in darkness, we light up a room; because the clotted guilt inside me breaks up and disperses before a surge of stupid happiness; because I love him, and I know I cannot leave him, am incapable of leaving him, unless he asks me to go. And he has not asked me. And that is the miracle which I live with, every day.

By staying, by shirking the responsibility and effort of leaving, by continuing to occupy this lovely man while giving him neither children nor a public companion nor a welcoming home-do I do wrong?

My love has saved me. It wraps strong arms around me when I cry with despair;it gives me the routine of a working week to lend vicarious structure to my shapeless days. It brings me daily laughter, a reason to keep washing...and it slices me open with guilt.

Joy lurks in every mundane thing, just waiting to be found. Love is impervious to reason. And words are wonderful.