They were linked by a hypothetical umbilical cord. His mind floated in the amniotic fluid of memory, listening for echoes of the past.

At some point in time, the world I knew either vanished or withdrew, and another world came to take its place. Like the switching of a track. In other words, my mind, here and now, belongs to the world that was, but the world itself has already changed into something else.

And it was the kind of thing that loses the most important nuances when reduced to words.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘at special moments like that, people feel a pain alongside their happiness.