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Thank you mellyjelly/drumthings for this fantabulous skin=D

And he left, knowing that he now had the reason to never go back, to never see her again, and to finally get her out of his blood, and out of his life. In the end it was so obvious. He should have expected it all along.

A new man. Of course. What else?

He wondered how he could ever have been so dumb, how he could ever have believed that she was really any different to him. She was just another girl. She was just another woman. How could it possibly end any other way? She had met some new guy. Right. Of course. He almost laughed. But somehow the banality of it all was impossible to grasp.

A new man, when she had told him that there would never be another man, and that she would love him until the day she died. All that stuff that they put in the songs. All the lies they tell you and you are so eager to believe.

Only you, for ever and ever, like one of the old songs. That's what she had told him, that's what had come out of the mouth he knew so well, and he had believed her, and it made his life impossible because it meant he could never give her up. It meant that one day and someday and somehow they would be together, because there was no escaping the other. They were bound together like two mountaineers. But now she had broken the bond.

He had been told that they did not feel love in the way that he felt love, that they responded to acts of kindness and generosity with all their body and heart, but that was not love, they told him, not in the Western sense of the one true one, the partner for life, the unmet lover found at last. Not love like that, like love back home, the way that it was meant to be, they said. Not real love the way it was made in the West.

They were just so practical when it came to love, they told him until he believed it, until he could see what they meant, and he could see that we in the West were not practical at all - we simply fell, we just took the giddy step over the cliff and landed where our wayward hearts took us.

The East was practical. The East could not afford to love. The West was romantic. Because the West could afford to love.

And perhaps she said it because she felt it too - the terrible finality of the ending, of letting it go, and she wanted him to stay for just a few more seconds, because they both knew they would never see each other again after today, and all they would ever share now was the past and whatever photographs that she had been unable to destroy.

My Favourite Wife by Tony Parsons