When I got to 38, things changed. I was pleased I had made it, and thought, ‘Everything after this is a bonus’

A woman I was very attached to died young, at 38. She had been married to a man she loved, had three small children and many talents that were beginning to bear fruit. I was younger than she was when she died; now, I’m much older. For a long time I considered her 38 years a sort of goal. If that had been her allotted span, surely that limit could also be mine. So I thought of my life as if it would not last longer than 38 years.

I know that may seem ridiculous but, in some corner of myself, it really was like that. And, all in all, I’m glad: in many ways I had a different sense of time from my contemporaries. I ran; they lingered. I felt old and burdened by responsibilities; they seemed young and irresponsible.

I always felt that I didn’t have enough time. I went to bed late, got up early, and used any idle moment – between children, work, marital disasters – to mould myself as quickly as possible, so that I would be able to say: this is me, these are my abilities. My contemporaries seemed to have infinite time ahead of them.

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But there was more. I lived with an anomalous sense of what it is to be old, of death. For example, I used to feel an irritation that even I found unreasonable when I heard someone say, “He died young, he was 64.” To me, 64 was the age of Methuselah, an excess, an abuse. Or maybe, in some way, an insult to my friend, her husband, her children.

When I got to 38, however, things gradually changed. I was pleased that I had made it and thought, “Everything after this is a bonus.”

And without realising it, I began to slow down. The years accumulated, one after another and, looking back, I seemed to have lived too intensely, demanded too much from myself and from others. I started feeling guilty. Had I bitten into life more greedily than my friend?

Not only that: with every year that passed, I felt relief, or even satisfaction, as if I’d won a contest, as if I were speeding miraculously towards some goal that was there only for me. Time slipped away, and every moment seemed one I wasn’t entitled to. I felt like a thief and, at the same time, experienced the pleasure of the kleptomaniac.

Today, I think of my friend as a person miraculously complete, and that makes me happy – it moves me. I’m still waiting, though more and more indifferently, for a new episode.

• Translated by Ann Goldstein. My Brilliant Friend starts on Sky Atlantic on 19 November.