The Life Impossible

by Matt Haig

I have never believed in magic, and I still don’t. But sometimes what looks like magic is simply a part of life we don’t understand yet.

He had never been much of a conversationalist, and being dead had done very little to improve the situation.

What I mean is that travel tesseracts experience. It explodes it to the fourth dimension. And it becomes dizzying to realise how many nows are happening all at once. To think of how many taxi drivers in every continent are talking into their radios right now. How many people are giving birth. Or eating a sandwich. Or writing a poem. Or holding the hand of someone they love. Or staring out of a window. Or talking to the dead.

I always think that the quickest way to understand someone is to look at what’s on their bookshelves. Especially if they are honest bookshelves, not the fancy ornamental kind.

Sometimes in order to be helpful we have to give up the desire to be liked.

In this state of mind it was hard to see any living person and not imagine the hole they would cause if they were gone. To see everyone on Earth as someone’s grief waiting to happen.

A few years before I had cut my ring finger while chopping an onion. The bleeding hadn’t stopped so I’d had to go to the hospital and get the tip cauterised. They burnt the blood vessels to stop the bleeding. And now I couldn’t feel anything on the tip of the finger. So I felt like that is what had happened to me, that grief and guilt and life had cauterised me and there was nothing new to experience. Just a wound to look at and keep prodding for a sign of feeling.

I had spent a lifetime hating my appearance in the present and then appreciating it in retrospect.

The way we judge our bodies. The way, as we become increasingly invisible with age, we still clutch tight to that self-consciousness. The way we curse the thing that has kept us alive all this time. I doubt a sparrow resents its wings, even when its feathers are dried and withered.

Everything looks obvious after history has tamed it.

We are never at the end of history. And we are not at the end of science.’

I wondered why every successful businessperson on the planet continued to work and visit offices and stare at computers when they could just quit and eat watermelon in the sun for ever.

You see, if you want to visit a new world, you don’t need a spacecraft. All you need to do is change your mind.

It was life. AC/DC was life. I was life.

Of course, we all make our own beliefs in this world and sometimes to shift them is a frightening thing. If you really want to make wonderful discoveries, as any good armadillo knows, you eventually have to remove your head from your bottom and look out at the bright, confusing day. Into the hidden glory, into the deeper mathematics, into the ultimate reality. Into life.

It was quite something, feeling that change inside him. It was like when the breeze stops and there is just the sunlight and you realise the day is warm.

‘You’re needed, Mum. You can be happy again. You don’t have to let things turn to sand. You were so happy, once upon a time. You can be that way again.’

It’s so strange that we don’t want spoilers in our stories but we seek them in our lives. We want to know we will fall in love, or be healthy, or finish the degree in style, get the good job or the comfortable pension.

‘Whatever is awaiting me is awaiting me. For now, let’s live.’