Today, while my partner and I walked along the edge of the highway toward an area where the houses, trees and dogs are larger, more expansive, and have received a greater degree of care, I told her that I had written a piece about her watching a beautiful slow elegant film with very little dialogue shot and based in Hong Kong about impossible love between a man and woman each of whom were in marriages to other people they were not able to leave on her laptop while I watched a film, on my laptop, that suggested, or seemed to suggest, that each of us has one true love – what various characters within the film referred to as ‘soulmates’. I said, my synopsis of the film she had watched was okay, but the sentences describing the film I had watched were all far too long and difficult to navigate. I said, the films were, in a way, similar, though, I said, one of them is a good film and one of them isn’t. She said, well, another thing that was said in the documentary about the film shot and based in Hong Kong, that she had watched yesterday, the day after having watched the film itself, is that originally the male character’s motivation for having the affair that would become the impossible love was revenge.

My partner did not say whether the revenge was towards his wife, or towards the husband of the woman he was having an affair with or, perhaps, whether it was towards the woman he was having an affair with herself. She had also learned, she went on, from the documentary that a series of comical scenes had been shot that had likewise not made it into the final version of the film.

Towards the end of the walk, once we were again beyond the area where the houses, trees and dogs are larger, my partner pointed out what appeared to be a mobile phone number scrawled into the footpath in large numerals, thirty to forty centimetres high. She said, it doesn’t say call this number to get your dick sucked. Look, she said, the number is all on its own.