Crossword-Solution: CONGESTED 9 letters, 31 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 13

Supermarkets this large and clean and modern are a revelation to me. I spent my life in small steamy delicatessens with slanted display cabinets full of trays that hold soft wet lumpy matter in pale colours. High enough cabinets so you had to stand on tiptoes to give your order. Shouts, accents. In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere. Men shout as they die to be noticed, remembered for a second or two. To die in an …

He perceived too in these still hours how little he had understood her hitherto. He had been blinded, — obsessed. He had been seeing her and himself and the whole world far too much as a display of the eternal dualism of sex, the incessant pursuit. Now with his sexual imaginings newly humbled and hopeless, with a realization of her own tremendous minimization of that fundamental of romance, he began to see all that there was in her personality and their possible relations out…

I realized that I sat in an empty bar in filthy, wet clothes with a drippy nose, probably red-rimmed eyes, and the most I could say I’d accomplished was that I was now congested. Oh, and one of the handsomest, nicest men I’d ever met cradled my face in warm, caressing hands with soft, sympathy in his brown eyes.