On insomnia-plagued nights, she told herself that she could have learned to live with and inside those stories, she would have found a way to meet them, offer to bandage him up, return him whole to himself. It was only much later when she realised that it wasn’t the stories, it was the constant fluctuation between being showered with attention and then abruptly ignored, being loved with a totalising force, and then treated with an arctic disregard. It was the knowledge that, at any moment, she could be made invisible: that terrible swing between being alive and dead.

Each person had five minutes.

There was fervour this time; people’s emotional connection to their views was deeply personal. And at a few points I sensed they were holding on for dear life to the promise not to interrupt. In those moments the promise seemed to be the only thing between them and disintegration of the person’s turn and the whole group’s integrity. For me these moments are reassuring, not alarming. The promise is rugged and soon reinstates the ingredients of attention and interest.

And because the promise in that way holds back the touchpaper of adrenaline and cortisol, the grounding of serotonin and oxytocin gradually increase, and those near-death moments subside. The speaker keeps thinking, and the others start again to understand, and even to learn.

From there people can risk factoring in to their view a few bits of the other’s view, knowing somewhere without words that their own identity is safe and sometimes even that their own identity can branch out a bit, consider this or that additional perspective, develop a new does-this-fit nuance. The fear of losing who we are at our core no longer calls the shots. Our freed minds do.

How ordinary and how strange human life is. And how delicately poised. Your own end might lie just in front of you, under your feet. This plane breaking up into a million flaming pieces, one moment from now.

She emerges from the confessional in a state of unease, far worse than when she went in. No penance to ease the burden! She knows she must end the affair but doesn’t think she can, a common human dilemma, not only related to romance. Shouldn’t have gone to the priest, not before she was ready. Who knows what she wanted when she went in there, but certainly not this outcome. Now she’s having a crisis.

Moti changed his name and there are days when she’d like to change hers too. A different name can make you feel different inside.