These battered, sand-strewn volumes are emblematic of a long love relationship which has recently ended. Soon after I married my wife, we got into an addictive Proust habit - I used to read the novel out loud to her, especially when we were on holiday. The bulk of it was read during successive summers on the Isla de Tavira in the Algarve - we would walk out to an isolated stretch of sand, build a shelter out of driftwood, bamboo and silk sarongs and lose ourselves in the hypnotic prose with the dull roar of Atlantic breakers in the background. I still think it's the best way to enjoy Proust - to get inside the head of the narrator and feel how his obsessions loop back on themselves, and to get the hilarious, laugh-out-loud comedy of the book - though it's hardly a practical one, as you need the best part of a decade to get through it all! It sounds like a weird, nerdy thing to do, but it happened gradually, and some summers it felt like we were in a sort of ménage à trois, with Proust as the funny, neurotic third party, brilliant at rhapsodizing on the theme of love but never getting any of the sex. Perhaps it's symbolic that, unlike Proust, we never got to the end - the last 200 or so pages are unread, in an envelope, detached from the final volume to save on luggage weight.

A 3-volume Proust

We grew so icy with each other those few days; what I thought might allow us to thaw the growing cold between us only solidified both our feelings. As you watched me scrape the ice off the car at the airport while you sat planning your family New Year's Eve, we both knew it was the end. 

Nothing was right for you in Marrakech, nor with the plan I'd painstakingly and lovingly created for us, but perhaps we were both ultimately too inflexible and too selfish. 

I accept my mistakes though the way you cruelly laid out my catalogue of faults still weighs heavy; my self-worth shattered. You never would acknowledge your own flaws though. Months of being fully present for you, limping from one family crisis to the next, trying to accommodate your needs, and taking on board all your interests. None of this - or the strain it placed on 'us' - was ever acknowledged. I thought there would be more grace, understanding and space for me when I needed it, but there was only space for you - I wish you'd been honest about that from the start; with me and with yourself. 

Hardest in all of this is realising that the person I fell in love with - and dreamed of building a future with - didn't exist, leaving me questioning my own judgement. 

But now, finally, I've cracked it and I am letting the illusion of you go. 

A 3-volume Proust

Freezing Point