WHEN SHE’S STILL waiting at 8.25, she is forced to accept that he won’t be arriving. A cloudy sunset seeps through half-cracked Venetian blinds, filling the room with milky gold. Thin beams of light reflect on her from the full-length mirror. She stands in front of it, motionless. Opaque streaks of carelessly applied hairspray have dried on the glass earlier in the day. Now they split her image into slices of flesh with uneven edges. Nothing in the room or inside her aligns.

This is not uncommon. By the third meeting with a man she is usually lost to reason. She thinks of a Stendhal quote she read somewhere: ‘To think of the rapidity and the violence with which I was drawn towards him.’She knows she’s overtaken like this too, no matter how hard she tries to pace the accelerating frames in her mind. Images of her past and future, then his, blend into theirs. She knows she shouldn’t think this way, but her thoughts are fast-moving glass slides.