After You'd Gone

by Maggie O'Farrell

I’m in love, she thinks, I love this man, I love him. She explores this feeling, cautiously, like someone walking on a newly healed limb for the first time, finding out its limitations, wary of any signs of weakness. Is she frightened? No. Excited? Yes - incredibly. She wants to gobble up time, to rush through days and weeks and years with him, so they can do everything right now. But, at the same time, she wants to freeze it:

Alice sometimes worries that she might lose her grip on life. Like the fear that your hand might suddenly veer out of control when you are writing your signature for the millionth time on a credit-card slip, she can occasionally see how easily something in her could break and she’d be left spinning in a limbo of panic and disorder.

She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she’s been absorbed in.