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I read Aminatta Forna's Memory of Love sometime last year, I think. 

The New Yorker has an article this week about "The Curse of Reading and Forgetting" and I feel nothing but comfort and joy at this. I feel like I am not alone in this - that other people also pick up books, happily read through atleast half or more than half of the book before realising that they've already read this. 

I nearly cried when I read that other people also have the same problem I do in social situations - that they have an intense urge to say "Yeah, I read that book! I loved it! It was so brilliant! etc etc" but they don't do it in constant fear of the other person bringing up plot details or dialogues or characters - none of which they will remember. Infact, I thought about what Ian Crouch quotes Nabokov for - rereading - and I figured that, really, the only books that I do remember anything about are books that I have reread. (The best example for this unfortunately, is Harry Potter and strangely enough, not Murakami.) 

Anyway, what I wanted to say about Aminatta Forna's Memory of Love is this - i loved it it was so brilliant she's my favorite author of the year last year etc etc - but there are very few things I remember about the book. Except for this line:

"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." 

I can quote that line in my sleep, almost. I know it like I know Cummings' Since Feeling Is First.  (Because I don't understand the whole of it. Not really.) 

A premonition of loss. 

I think it is because I spent a long time thinking about what she could have meant by a premonition of loss.

Because I got feeling love and loss. I felt it, deeply. I knew what she was talking about.  But a premonition of loss? I failed to understand it. I left this to my unconventional experiences of love. I thought, well, I don't know what it feels like, so I probably don't understand it.

The thing is - I think I get it now. A premonition of loss.  As she walks away from you, of possibilities and hope, of things coming together and falling apart. A premonition of loss. Not of loss, simply. Not a life you can have, by itself. But both. Simultaneously. A feeling of something wrenching at your gut, of something that you can have but something you can't hold.

A premonition of loss.