He had never meant to end up alone. He had never made some grand decision that he was better off without people, irritating, dull, ignorant. It had just fallen out that way. He hadn’t felt that white-hot spark between himself and someone else, promised all through childhood, that welded soulmates together, or inspired friends of long standing to declare each other ‘gits for dying first’ in their eulogies. Instead there had been a hundred shades of grey, each drifting through his life on their way to nowhere in particular. Acquaintances, friends, lovers; they had all gone away sooner or later. And he had never felt the urge to find them again.

Eventually, he had found himself treading a path every day on which he no longer met new people. And he enjoyed it. It was quiet, and he could hear the birds singing. So he kept treading the same old route, scoring it deep into the earth. Perhaps at some point in its years-long carving that rut became difficult to climb out of, but he had never had reason to try.

As he plodded that track, day after changeless day, shading from middle to old age, his sight failed. He had lost the vision in his left eye during a boating accident in his youth, a half-rotten rope tearing itself in half and whipping up into just the wrong point of his face.  Sea water, heavy with salt, had leapt up with it. His clearest memories were its deep red colour as it ran back down onto his cream jersey, the sickening realisation that he could only see it with a single eye. There had been terror and screaming, later a first and most awful realisation of the permanence of a single moment. But he had grown used to his loss. So he couldn’t see depth any more. So what. He was colour-blind too, and he wasn’t torn up over that.

The gradual darkening of his right eye, though, was not so easily accepted. The sight in the other had been gone in a moment, swift, unambiguous, immediate. It had left no time for reflecting on what the end of the process would be, or how it related to that longer, second blackness beyond the end of all his sight. Before, only one day had been worse than the day before. But now there was a sinking gradient of decay, rolling towards that terminal day when he would see the gold of the Sun for the final time.

That day has come and gone. These days he has a dog, a border collie that he raised from a puppy. She’s grown into a calm old thing, able to live in peace with nearby rabbits and squirrels. Nor does she bark at the postman, or worry about fireworks on bonfire night. But she is always touching her master, pressing up against his legs or nuzzling his ankles, as though to say, ‘I am here, I am here, I am here.’