From one of my backpacker friends' albums, she's now in Europe, couch surfing on a shoestring. I need to travel real soon... itchy!!! I thought the heart lock was simply lovely, innit?I heard a song, a morning as I walked to college. It came to me across the radio playing on a stall I passed. A song from far away, about a lost love. At least so I imagined, I didn’t understand the words, only the melody.
But in the low notes I could hear the loss this man had suffered. And in the high notes I understood too that it was a song about something that could never be.
I had not wept in years. But I did, there and then, on the side of a dusty street, surrounded by strangers. The melody stayed with me for years. This is how it is when you glimpse a woman for the first time, a woman you know you could love. People are wrong when they talk of love at first sight. It is neither love nor lust. No. As she walks away from you, what you feel is loss. A premonition of loss.
-Excerpt from a wonderfully written novel I’m about to read and purchase next.
She has been shortlisted for the Orange Book prize for women novelists 2011.
Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love.
But in the low notes I could hear the loss this man had suffered. And in the high notes I understood too that it was a song about something that could never be.
I had not wept in years. But I did, there and then, on the side of a dusty street, surrounded by strangers. The melody stayed with me for years. This is how it is when you glimpse a woman for the first time, a woman you know you could love. People are wrong when they talk of love at first sight. It is neither love nor lust. No. As she walks away from you, what you feel is loss. A premonition of loss.
-Excerpt from a wonderfully written novel I’m about to read and purchase next.
She has been shortlisted for the Orange Book prize for women novelists 2011.
Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love.
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