After You'd Gone

by Maggie O'Farrell

I don’t believe in fate. I don’t believe in cushioning your insecurities with a system of belief that tells you, ‘Don’t worry. This may be your life but you’re not in control. There is something or someone looking out for you - it’s already organised.’ It’s all chance and choice, which is far more frightening.

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: she knows enough about love to be aware of its double bind - that there’s no love without pain, that you can’t ever love someone without that tinge of dread at how it might end.

Alice is my girlfriend: he tries out the idea. My new girlfriend. The language for these situations frustrates him. ‘We are going out together’ - he hates that phrase. ‘Girlfriend’ seems hopelessly teenage and inadequate. What then? ‘Partner’ is too business like, ‘lover’ a bit racy for everyday parlance. ‘Friend’? Sounds like he has something to hide. ‘Special friend’ - oh, please. None of these words is enough because what he really wants to say and wants to tell everyone is--

How did this happen? How did she fall so in love with him that she feels her very sanity is threatened by the possibility of their parting?

How could she have been so weak as to let this happen - to become this dependent on another person? She had always vowed to herself that she would never let her happiness depend on another. How can this have happened?

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.

What are you supposed to do with all the love you have for somebody if that person is no longer there? What happens to all that leftover love? Do you suppress it? Do you ignore it? Are you supposed to give it to someone else?