Volume.

"Are you sure that I'm enough for you?" is the question upon which all relationships pivot - the see-saw which occasionally aligns itself with a nearby star, yet just as frequently points groundwards.

If we are fishing for compliments, though, instead of posing the question in all its dead-eyed austerity, we ask with the beginnings of a smile forming around our lips, and we hope that the answer is that we are more than enough: you are without boundaries, and yet still I can traverse any part of you without feeling lost.

The prospect of moving blindly over an infinite terrain is terrifying. Without signposts, which develop when the private language of a couple is expanded, there is no way of understanding moods, gestures, words? Without knowing that I used to wear black every July 13, without knowing that I am scared of cars as toddlers are of monsters, without knowing that I worship cats, how can anyone begin to pare down what seems to be endlessness?

Nothing is endless, of course, except perhaps the universe - yet couples not only delude themselves that this is the case, but eventually give it primacy. Above laughter. Above love. Above intimacy, we raise the imaginary flag of infinity.

British marriage vows spell this out explicitly. In agreeing to love, honour, and obey, we permit our every last thought to be dissected in front of us in a thousand different ways. This is surveillance intimacy, but the machinery does not yet exist to drag out reluctant cognitions into the light.

From the disorientation of a blank terrain, then, we are presented with so many signs that every analysis is spiked on or trips over one or more, and the result is the same dull incomprehension.

Moderation, then, is the best thing. Trapped between the ocean, sick of its vastness, and the signifier which reveals all as it explains nothing, is moderation. Wedding vows should appeal to the possible, and leave the higher echelons of thought to the irresponsible dreamers and poets.

Withering.

The passage of time whittles away ambition, to the point where the non-talented become lip-curling, miserable solipsists.

If once the intention was to illuminate the whole universe with the light of the intellect, this aspiration soon dwindles, and getting out of bed is itself a lofty aim.

Oh, the exhaustion of trying to decode the world soon becomes too much - the ineluctable principles of imaginary numbers and dimensionless vectors just doesn't sink in, and defeat after defeat chills the bones.

So we compromise our ambitions - if we can't understand the world, then understanding even part of it will suffice. Even this, though, is too difficult, and we give up and walk away in frustration: learning another language where the strange words trip over each other and die.

What remains when ambition has dwindled to a cinder, a slender loop of light surrounding not the universe or even the world, but just the stinking vessel of the self? The remorseless ticking off of seconds and minutes and hours and days and.... spent in a self-contained bubble of anaesthetic.

Withering before my very eyes, there is little left. Writing like an incompetent, and the Spanish preterite's bones dissolving into forgetfulness. There is little left - determination, purpose, confidence.

Everything, when left untended, either grows unchecked or returns to a foetal nub.

Chain.

Suicide, says Camus, is brought about when that which has been tolerated for an arbitrary amount of time becomes at once unbearable, or absurd.

Go to work, go home, go to bed: this is the new-old reality in the absence of Bluefish, and I observe the pattern sadly.

I speak not of an internal 'observation,' enumerating day after day after day, but I instead stand outside myself, fully aware of the futility in which I engage.

I have no plans to end my life, but I understand the mindset which plants the seed of the decision. When it appears that one is condemned to an infinite number of repetitions, it is logical to want to break the circle.

Logical? But surely there is no logic in the thinking machine that unplugs itself forever?

(Some) physicists have postulated that the universe is a giant computer, which, when it is approaching its death is able to perform an increasingly large number of steps. At the very point when the 'Big Crunch' occurs, the number of steps is infinite, and so any calculation or rendering is possible.

On the much smaller human scale, what clarity and work would be possible at the moment the synapses act upon the decision to extinguish themselves, assuming that the physicists' view is a) valid and b) applicable in another domain?

How simple to encapsulate the universe! To evaluate and revise it - simplicity itself - when the mind is teetering between being itself and being nothing at all. And this is the logic of suicide: the brief unification of everything and then the void.

Indifference.

The sun is indifferent to the appeals of man: it emits light irrespective.

The sun is indifferent to questions: it shines on belligerently when I mouth at it.

The sun is deaf - the most hard-of-hearing object in a silent universe.

The rain is indifferent too - it would fill the whole world had it the strength.

The rain takes no commands; it drowns them instead.

Blind to suffering is the rain.

Other people are indifferent; smoking their cigarettes.

And talking about the TV - closed shells.

They have no redeeming words.

The northern hemisphere is indifferent.

Except for me -

Squinting at a dot marked 'Canberra.'

Return.

You weren't even able to look at me after we'd unstuck our bodies for the last time: a hopeless mess of kisses and tears at Heathrow.

I walked down the steps and away, and now as I write you shimmer thousands of feet above me, three hours into your journey back to the furthest point on the earth.

Meanwhile, I scrutinise every relic you left behind - the mostly-drunk glass of wine, the shirt with the pony on it, a cover cleansed of the blood you shed during our final, frantic burst of love-making on Thursday night - a coming-together which generated sufficient heat and pressure to give birth to a constellation of stars.

I want to rebuild you with the small stock of items that remain. I'll be finding your unbelievably long, unbelievably dark hairs for weeks yet and holding them in the air to assess how they catch the light in this position but not in that one.

There's a ticket from the public transport system in Geneva. Geneva, where we pretended to be married for a weekend, and I signed you into the hotel as my wife. This was the realisation of what had initially started as somewhat mocking and fantastical practice of naming our fictitious children, and whose evolution saw us examining names with great care and deliberation.

You weren't able to look at me in the despairing last throes of our time together, and I understand why. I understand that to look again means the re-emergence of tears which act not as catharsis but as a deepening of misery; crying for the sake of the past, present and future instead of just the past.

I scrutinise every relic, and I'm about to abandon the worst day of my life for the release that a heavy, burdened sleep will bring - a poor excuse of a release, but better than staying here with eyes that refuse to pull down the shutters. As I do so, I'll take the shirt and the cowbit, and hope that I can re-connect with you in some way in your cloud-spattered trajectory.

Cambridge (2).

Little city glowing in the heat-haze next to the river.

Tight streets spitting out grumbling, lost souls in the middle of nowhere. The entropy of the afternoon.

Great pillars of learning drew veils over themselves - not today - smirking in the comfort of age from high over our heads.

Thirsty for the shade of noontime trees, whose limbs tangled feebly with the sun's density.

Foetal, wrapped around and around yourself, thumb quietly pushed into mouth: frivolous sounds are admonished - as with monks.

Here is where the modern world cannot penetrate - yet the 21st century is assimilated without blinking.

Cambridge (1)

• allus wuk ard wen tha at school] said my father] enough times during my adolescence for me to be able to regulate the beating of my heart to the utterances of his syllables
• all-us-wuk-ard-wen-tha-at-school[ thump thump[ breathe in[ breathe out[ all-us-wuk-ard
• i could regulate my very life to his metronomic words but they never had any value as an imperative> being a teenager i exercised my right to ignore them
• his advice swam weakly around my head when i shut the fucking geography teacher in the store cupboard and turned the lock] and when i put the drawing pin on the french teacher?s chair and when i went up to school on a saturday night to put dog shit through the head of year?s office letter box> how d?you like that] laughing until i was almost sick
• i didn?t wuk ard> in fact i did next to nothing] scraping four gcses and more/or/less condemning myself to a lifetime of hand/to/mouth existence
  
• my father was livid> thou art a bluddy disgrace> tha ant listened to owt a teld thi] his face ashen with disgust and rage
• to me then> a working class lad frum tarn with modest/tending/towards/mediocre qualifications> cambridge was always a distant ambition> the shining castle on the hill> the fruited plain of the hymn
• i woke up a bit when i was 16^but by then it was probably too late>i never got within a million miles>
• so imagine how i felt when i visited cambridge for the first time in my life> blue fish and i both with the same awesome sense of failure chilling us> neither of us are fucking stupid love] this could?ve been us
• i failed