After You'd Gone

by Maggie O'Farrell

I don’t believe in fate. I don’t believe in cushioning your insecurities with a system of belief that tells you, “Don’t worry. This may be your life but you’re not in control. There is something or someone looking out for you—it’s already organised.” It’s all chance and choice, which is far more frightening.

she knows enough about love to be aware of its double bind—that there’s no love without pain, that you can’t ever love someone without that tinge of dread at how it might end.

I loved him more than anything else I’d ever known. How was I to know he was a gift I couldn’t keep?

‘Love is not changed by death and nothing is lost, and all in the end is harvest.’ ”

We got married three years after we first met. I didn’t want to, not really.

What else is there to say? That I loved him more than I ever thought it was possible to love anyone. That his father never spoke to him again.

“Alice, one thing I hope you never find out is that a broken heart hurts physically.”

What are you supposed to do with all the love you have for somebody if that person is no longer there? What happens to all that leftover love? Do you suppress it? Do you ignore it? Are you supposed to give it to someone else?

I’ve never been able to think of those charity shops in the same way: how they must be full of the outflows of tragedy and loss.

And even now, after I stepped into the path of a car—a two-tonne hammer of steel, chrome and reinforced glass, travelling at a hurtling velocity—my body still clings to life, and I find myself suspended like Persephone between two states. I can’t say which one I want. Death seems difficult and elusive to me.