"By the time ordinary life asserted itself once more, I would feel I had already lived for a while in some other lifetime, that I had even taken over someone else's life"

Ordinary life returns like a tide, steady and insistent, but between its ebb and flow the self slips into a different current. The speaker evokes those charged intervals, reading a novel deep into the night, falling in love, performing a role, traveling alone, grieving, when identity loosens and another pattern of being takes hold. Time stretches; habits fall away; the mind learns the grammar of someone else’s choices. Coming back, one carries the eerie conviction of having lived elsewhere, not as a visitor but as an interim resident.

This is less escapism than transformation through attention. To attend so fiercely to an imagined world or another person is to let boundaries grow porous. Empathy here is tactile: you borrow postures, cadences, fears. “Taking over someone else’s life” sounds transgressive because it is, a gentle trespass that art, love, and crisis make possible. With it comes responsibility: the borrowed life must be returned with care, and the borrower is changed by the borrowing.

The phrasing “ordinary life asserted itself” suggests that normality is not the default but a competing force, one that reclaims us after a spell. The other lifetime is liminal, yet no less real in its effects. It leaves residues, new reflexes, altered values, a sense of double exposure in which the familiar street overlays an elsewhere.

Adolescence offers a vivid version of this: the self experiments with masks until the mask leaves a face-shaped imprint. Margaret Mahy’s worlds often hinge on such shapeshifting, magical or psychological, as characters discover that identity is a verb. To live richly is to risk temporary possession, to let oneself be written by another pattern, then to return with widened sight.

What remains is the aftertaste: estrangement threaded with gratitude. Ordinary life continues, but it carries a stowaway, a second life folded into memory, changing how the first is lived.