After You'd Gone

by Maggie O'Farrell

But diseases, lightning and madmen aside, I could realistically live until I was seventy or eighty. Longer, perhaps. I couldn’t believe I was going to live for all that time. I would find them incomprehensible - those fifty or so years stretching out before me that I would have to live without you. What was I going to do to fill them? It seemed cruel to me that I was so healthy, so alive, so seemingly indestructible when your life had been so easily and so randomly severed. I was puzzled by those women in previous centuries dying of broken hearts, taking to their beds and just fading away. That’s what I wanted: I desired nothing more than to lie down and let life ebb from me. I couldn’t believe it when, every morning, I opened my eyes and felt it surging through me like sap through a tree - that aliveness, that undeniable force of existence. The beat of my heart, the swell of my lungs, the stiffness in my muscles that was telling me, despite everything, to get up, use my legs, stretch my arms.