The Midnight Library - Matt Haig Page 0,88

head, this was the worst life could feel, and yet it was life, and life was precisely what she wanted.

It was hard, near impossible, to pull herself off the bed but she knew she had to get vertical.

She managed it, somehow, and grabbed her phone but it seemed too heavy and slippy to keep a grasp of and it fell onto the floor beyond view.

‘Help,’ she croaked, staggering out of the room.

Her hallway seemed to be tilting like it was a ship in a storm. But she reached the door without passing out, then dragged the chain lock off the latch and managed, after great effort, to open it.

‘Please help me.’

She barely realised it was still raining as she stepped outside in her vomit-stained pyjamas, passing the step where Ash had stood a little over a day before to announce the news of her dead cat.

There was no one around.

No one that she could see. So she staggered towards Mr Banerjee’s house in a series of dizzy stumbles and lurches, eventually managing to ring the doorbell.

A sudden square of light sprung out from the front window.

The door opened.

He wasn’t wearing his glasses and was confused maybe because of the state of her and the time of night.

‘I’m so very sorry, Mr Banerjee. I’ve done something very stupid. You’d better call an ambulance . . .’

‘Oh my lord. What on earth has happened?’

‘Please.’

‘Yes. I’ll call one. Right away . . .’

00:03:48

And that is when she allowed herself to collapse, forwards and with considerable velocity, right onto Mr Banerjee’s doormat.

The sky grows dark

The black over blue

Yet the stars still dare

To shine for you

The Other Side of Despair

‘Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ‘on the other side of despair.’

It wasn’t raining any more.

She was inside and sitting in a hospital bed. She had been put on a ward and had eaten and was feeling a lot better. The medical staff were pleased, following her physical examination. The tender abdomen was to be expected, apparently. She tried to impress the doctor by telling her a fact Ash had told her, about a stomach lining renewing itself every few days.

Then a nurse came and sat on her bed with a clipboard and went through reams of questions relating to her state of mind. Nora decided to keep her experience of the Midnight Library to herself because she imagined that it wouldn’t go down too well on a psychiatric evaluation form. It was safe to surmise the little-known realities of the multiverse probably weren’t yet incorporated within the care plans of the National Health Service.

The questions and answers continued for what felt like an hour. They covered medication, her mother’s death, Volts, losing her job, money worries, the diagnosis of situational depression.

‘Have you ever tried anything like this before?’ the nurse asked.

‘Not in this life.’

‘And how do you feel right now?’

‘I don’t know. A bit strange. But I don’t want to die any more.’

And the nurse scribbled on the form.

Through the window, after the nurse had gone, she watched the trees’ gentle movements in the afternoon breeze and distant rush-hour traffic shunt slowly along Bedford ring road. It was nothing but trees and traffic and mediocre architecture, but it was also everything.

It was life.

A little later she deleted her suicidal social media posts, and – in a moment of sincere sentimentality – she wrote something else instead. She titled it ‘A Thing I Have Learned (Written By A Nobody Who Has Been Everybody)’.

A Thing I Have Learned

(Written By A Nobody Who Has Been Everybody)

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.

But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s