Love and Other Thought Experiments

What did your clothes smell like? It wasn’t your own scent, Arthur thought, not to you anyway. His clothes at Hal’s always smelt of the Somerset earth, damp and iron-rich. In London, he remembered cedar and laundry detergent. And the particular scent of Eliza. The trace of chemicals from the lab where she worked, and the perfume she wore, a verbena

You might wonder how I know that being charmed and being touched were the right feelings for which to aim, unequipped as I am for corporeal experience. As your creator, I am constantly surprised by how little you credit me. I know everything. Knowledge and experience are quite different, but I like to think that I can identify and name the little f

Had she changed as much as her hair? Probably. She wondered if she could even be considered the same person now that every cell in her body had been replaced, more than once. It didn’t seem to matter so much when the effect was growth and health but now that shrinkage and damage were the order of events, it mattered a lot. Was it possible that her

In my head on this particular day are Tomasini’s String Quartet in B flat major IV, the sound of a thousand butterflies dancing in a field one late summer, the cover illustration from a Penguin edition of Our Mutual Friend, a recipe for Key Lime cheesecake, the text of an A-level Geography book, and a pocket watch.