Intermezzo

by Sally Rooney

You can drive yourself crazy thinking about different things you could have done in the past. But sometimes I think, actually, I didn’t have that much power over my life anyway. I mean, I couldn’t give myself a new personality out of nothing. And things just kind of happened to me.

Remembering their father in the ICU, in terrible pain then, and they had to give him morphine. Ivan sometimes wished it would happen. Yes, because he thought of death as an event, something that would happen and then be over. And indeed, when it came to be over, there was relief, there was a certain freedom with that, to be free of the anxiety of waiting. In the months since, Ivan has embraced this sense of freedom, he can see that now. He has made impulsive decisions, he has fallen in love, his life has been transformed, in an uncontrolled rush of energy and feeling. To live, he has needed to live, to overcome the terrible event, yes, it was needed. But now that the event has come and gone, the funeral, the various rituals, only the loss remains, which can never be recuperated. The event is over, the event has been overcome, and yet the loss is only beginning. Every day, it grows deeper, more and more is forgotten, less and less really known for certain. And nothing will ever bring his father back from the realm of memory into the reassuringly concrete world of material fact, tangible and specific fact: and how, how is it possible to accept this, or even to understand what it means?