Experiment

Leave the lights on in your flat. Put your coat on, go downstairs and sit out in the square under the trees and look up at the warm glow in your own windows. Imagine it's not your house but that some other girl lives there. Think about that girl - does she live alone? She must have some kind of wonderful job to live in that big flat by herself. Maybe she worked hard to get there but I bet she loves it, doing what she always dreamed of. Perhaps she gets to travel to exciting places and see things she'd never even imagined. A girl like that is clever, good at what she does: she never doubts herself for a moment.

She'll have a sweet boyfriend who is crazy about her: he'll come around on his day off and help her fix pictures to the walls of the new apartment and together they'll buy a huge rug from some hippy shop in St Gilles and carry it home on the metro, giggling and beaming at each other. The warmth streaming from the windows carries with it the growing warmth of the flat as it slowly becomes a home. Another armchair, a tall plant in a ceramic pot, a dining room table. A Sunday afternoon spent drinking coffee after coffee on Place St Boniface or the Parvis de St Gilles, stealing kisses and pretending to be shy when nobody really notices them at all. They'll take pictures of each other and make silly faces and laugh at how goofy they are. Secretly they'll both imagine tottering infants with ginger hair and huge dark eyes and a dewy garden in the spring sunshine some time in the hazy future. Their lives spread before them full of love and laughter and everything looks perfect.

And there you are, sitting out alone in the square in the cold and the dark, pretending.