Chapter XXXII, where Adele tells about a night when she needed a hot water bottle

I hate cramps. I really felt like I needed a hot water bottle but instead I told Noelle to come sit next to me to ease my pain. I was reading this book by Paul Auster, where the character is trying to write about a man who goes out to run some errand and almost gets hit by something that falls from a building. He escapes death and thinks it's some kind of sign telling him to walk away from his life and to forget everything about his past and start fresh. Some weird train of thought led me to thinking about *him*, like how it would be if I simply let go of all this. I don't think there would be much to actually be forgotten. There aren't all these memories that would come back to my mind over an over and make me dwell in the past. The memories we share are made of words typed and organized in an e-mail account. Of course there are some pictures, but mostly all we have is just words. We have the memories from one week spent together, memories of things we've actually done together that sort of gets lost in the middle of all these months of words and images. I think there wouldn't be much in the past to forget if we never talked again but there would be the possibility of creating things to be remembered or forgotten like that in the future that then would never have a chance to exist. This is not supposed to mean anything. These are just thoughts. My last cigarettes still taste awful. I don't think I'll finish this pack till tomorrow.

In a way, it's like a book you really like reading and want to get to the end but at the same time you don't want to finish it because you like it so much; so you don't know whether you should read it fast or slow down so the end is a bit further in time. What I meant was the memories are words and if we had to look back, there would be few things to miss, I mean 'real life' things. Like, I don't know, the small things that we always remember about people we miss. The face that he makes when he listens to this or that song, or how he looks in the morning, or how he showers and doesn't have an order to do stuff in the shower, or how he likes spicy food or how he. I don't know.