You are -> here <- and there is no way back

"Lewin reflected upon the ones that we leave behind when we follow our path through life, that their lives continue unseen regardless, and of all that we might have seen and done had things occurred differently. Would he have been happier with these people still in his life, any more so than he was with his current lot? Would they be happier with him in their lives? It was impossible to know. Futile to contemplate. He certainly knew that he wished not to have stayed for a lifetime but for at least a little more time – one always wishes this when there is no more time left or opportunity to spend it."

Defaced

"He was never entirely sure whether the thing he did next - the thing he always did next, the thing he had to do - was because the woman before him was not the one he had become fixated with or because in a way she was, whether she bore too striking a similarity or not quite enough. He knew that when the deed was done (heart beating so hard that he thought he was dying) she was neither, and her face could no longer taunt him frustratingly with what was different and what was the same, what he had and what he had not, because it was no longer there. He watched her bleed out in the morning light, noting the final slow and steady breath as he cleaned his equipment."

Extract from prologue

...sated, it turns its head ponderously this way and that, eventually facing upward: a dizzying wealth of stars. Once they were familiar but now they are made strange by the years. It reminds itself that there are no stars where it lies now, in a place where memory comprises almost the totality of existence and all else is cold stone and silence. With a deft exercise of will it scatters these thoughts and returns to the past.

Stars. No end of stars, blinking into existence and disappearing again as quickly, the life cycle of entire worlds played out before there is time to recognise it. Time is liquid, abstract, to be lived or recollected as slowly or quickly as it chooses. It slows then to the tempo where concepts like nights and days have meaning in time to see a meteor shower rake the horizon.
       As the glittering fire falls through the atmosphere a new image transposes itself: dust motes caught in a beam of light, in a small room with bare floorboards, and now it is shooting down toy soldiers with a cork gun...