The handful of times in the first couple of years when I was in another town or city, it was as if my intestines were stretched like elastic leading from me to her, over the fields and rivers and motorways and towns, and the farther away I was, or the longer I spent separated from her, the tauter and more nagging they became. Each time I returned, I was as desperate and panicked to get to her as if she were a ticking bomb I needed to defuse. I would run back to her down the road, jonesing, as if meeting a lover.
