The Perfect Bond is based on as much fact, emotion and fiction as a story requires and tolerates. I’m in love with it for the way it carries me back to a certain dream, and a certain summer’s day when I had tea with a friend in the sprawling gardens of the seaside mansion where I lived with my two children. My husband had died about a year ago. It was the worst death that I had ever experienced to happen to someone. Because it broke me.
Yes, I could still outline the dreamt face on paper if I wanted to. I wasn’t 22 in the photo that I posted with the story. That photo dates back to the time which the story at the beginning of the second part (this being its mild peripeteia) reveals to be the actual time (in the story’s setting) all along. I estimate this to be about six years ago, 2014/2015. This is one of the photos when sorrow and pain had set in but hope still doggedly pushed back on decline and decay. This must have been when I had just come out of the shower. I wasn’t wearing make-up. A woman can dispense with make-up when she has just stepped out of the shower. The molten flesh on the face hardly shows.
