Sweaty slumber, followed by late mornings of writing in my diary while Daragh watches football highlights on his mobile phone. Across the street, under an Orthodox church, a pine snakes out through a cut in the wall, shading the path; lovers pause to kiss beneath it.

The other night we had an awful meal in an overpriced restaurant: beautiful setting, a cosy terraced atrium framed by bougainvillea, pink blossoms drifting onto our table, but the food was mediocre and the wine poorly advised. According to our concierge, the owner is married to "an idiot" who won't let her change things to improve footfall. I thought of them, wife and husband, sitting with their adult children beside us in an otherwise empty place, having a long meal while their wee white dog begged for attention. Happy, but with this fissure there, all the same, the natural distance between individual desires and needs.

I think of the distance--physical, imaginary, psychological--between us. In bed, on the beach, in bars. So much of the time I feel I'm pulled by Daragh's cares, while mine are loosely attended, by the both of us, because they are so vaguely defined. What grows in the fissure between us, I don't know anymore.

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