When we grow up, we find ways to hide our anxieties, out loneliness, our fear and sorrow. But children hide nothing, putting everything into their tears, which they spread liberally about for the whole world to see. I wanted to savour every one of Rie’s tears, to run my tongue over the damp, festering, vulnerable places in her heart and open the wounds even wider.

In fact, I don’t really understand couples at all. They seem like some sort of inexplicable gaseous body to me- a shapeless, colourless, unintelligible thing, trapped in a laboratory beaker.