Echo Boy

by Matt Haig

Time doesn’t always go at the same speed. Two weeks can sometimes seem like half a lifetime.

‘I like reading. I enjoy it. It helps me escape. In my head, I mean.’

It is better to be alive than in a waking sleep. It is better to remember than to forget. It is better to feel than to be numb. It is better to be a sad poem than a blank page. We are humans.

‘A book is a map,’ she had said, after I had finished reading Jane Eyre. ‘There will be times in your life when you will feel lost and confused. The way back to yourself is through reading. There is not a problem in existence that has not been eased, somewhere and at some time, by a book.

It was weird. You could be broken by life, you could lose your parents, you could be smashed into a thousand pieces, but there was always something at the core of you, something that no one else could touch. The irrepressible light inside you. We were made from stardust, like everything in the universe, and we – each of us – carried a power inside us. A power that couldn’t be destroyed any more than the universe could be destroyed. And it was a power I only really knew was there once my parents had been killed. Because before then I had never really been tested.

I suppose that’s what parents are: a collection of views, some of which you reject and some of which you inherit, like a book that you go on editing for ever.

Maybe it was like love. You couldn’t be a little bit human in the same way you couldn’t be a little bit in love. It was all or nothing. A drop was an ocean. And maybe being human wasn’t even down to DNA in the end. Maybe it was just about the ability to love, when you knew love was irrational. Yeah. Maybe being human was to make no sense.

Maybe you could only live life by heading towards the things that frightened you.