..There were all sorts...

We spoke in that relaxed and highly conventionalised way that the friend´s lover and the lover´s friend tend to when they find themselves alone. We were eager to like each other and laughed too quickly at each other´s jokes. We talked about Freddie and about Belinda but the conversation was all the time revolving around Steranko. He both restricted our intimacy and made it possible.
There were all sorts of other things we could have said and we avoided all of them.
Instead, Foomie asked what I wanted to do, what kind of work I wanted. I said I didn´t know, that for as long as I could remember I had been living from one conversation to the next, going nowhere slowly.



Taken from The Colour Of Memory by Geoff Dyer