Round and round his life had moved in circles. Beginnings, then middles, then ends. And then, yet another beginning. What went by once, came by again, in another form, another shape--sometimes only the names changed--the subjects and objects, as with many other human lives, remained the same set of revolving obsessions: places, women, wars, kings, princes, priests, poets, friends, years, months, days, moments, breaths. The circles changed colours and sizes; sometimes they overlapped in time and space: he had two women at a time, lived in three cities intermittently, changed and switched loyalties; other times he let the circles lie lazily one on another, concentric, simplified.

But a circle it always was. Until she came and brought with her a soft chasm of unknown possibilities in one hand and an unending flight of ecstasy in another and fused them both to yank him out of his circular past, casting him in a shapeless, fluid present where he was perpetually trying to salvage sanity out of living moments. Most of all, he lost his circles: each morning the day refused to begin; each night the day refused to end. It seemed dangerous and insane--this loss, especially because he seemed to have acquired an unendurable hatred for all things he had cherished so far. Besides, in the bigger scheme for things, she was unattainable. Or was she?

This wasn't the impossible sort of courtly love that he had heard bards sing in the great halls of Lisbon. This was the possible sort of love that reeked of a cruel ending.