Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

For in my mind, at that time—as perhaps it is for most young people—I was at the center of things, the only person in the world with true freedom. I moved from here to there, observing life as it presented itself to me, but everybody else in these scenes, all the subsidiary characters, belonged only in the compartments in which I had placed them:

That is what it’s like, being in love. You want to know someone, better.”