Photograph.

Sometimes I open the photograph of Bluefish and I, one taken in an English seaside town at the height of summer, and I wonder if we ever existed at all.

The photograph is by now a fossil, trapped in the frozen river of linear time. A black hole is the photograph, sucking in any information about what existed before it and came after it.

Nobody would know that, in the hours before it was taken, Bluefish and I had cursed our way through sun-struck streets, wheeling a rectangle of luggage which regularly ran into trouble on the uneven surfaces. The two of us had been very close to losing our tempers as we searched out a distant hotel, and the mood darkened further when the satellite navigation system on my mobile phone kept sending us around in circles.

And it would be hard to discern from Bluefish's relaxed smile that the pair of us were being destroyed - not with the devastating light and impact of a bomb, inverting everything in its vicinity, but more akin to a shipwreck.

The inevitability of her return to a distant land meant that we slowly fell apart, committing with each passing hour another part of ourselves to an imminent future which had already been taken care of. Each thought of that yet-to-be endured Friday night at Heathrow sweetened the pair of us in the depths of misery.

So the photograph is arrogant, or spoiled. It demands that the eye focus on it, and nothing else. Context and depth mean nothing to it - a bore in brightly-coloured clothing.

Yet to those with a sliver of 'inside' knowledge, the photograph is at once transformed from mediocrity. The image of Bluefish and I, packed tightly together and filling the eye, can never be mediocre - it is, instead, painful.

It is painful because it refers to a past which is irretrievable, and which no kiss of life can ever re-animate. Couples always isolate particular aspects of the world, and declare them the stage upon which their relationship is to be played out: our song, our television programme. In general, they draw upon the cultural output of others, and greedily appropriate it.

These are just borrowed, though. The only things which truly belong to them are the fruits of their own labour. More poignant than any photograph is the rush of sadness which fizzes through the self when I contemplate our history, or when it is visited on me in the form of a photograph.

Do you remember how I was sitting on that bench, swearing? Do you remember how you snapped at me because I suggeded getting a cab - my solution to everything? A couple of hours later, it didn’t matter because you were smiling like an angel, and what I now look at is the shadow of an angel, stuck fast somewhere in the middle of a long-gone summer.