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.

‘I feel like I have a life inside me that needs to be lived and I am not living it.’

There are two kinds of ghosts that torment you when a young person dies. The ghost of who they were, and the ghosts of who they could have been.

always think that the quickest way to understand someone is to look at what’s on their bookshelves.

Someone once told me the way to die happy is to die complete. To live like you eat a delicious meal. To devour and enjoy every course so that when you have finished you are full, and enjoyed every mouthful, but aren’t too sad there is no more.

A fortune teller. I think it was for tourists most of the time. Not the local people. I never asked her too much about it…’

‘Who was her husband?’ I asked Rosella. ‘Johan. He was just an old Dutch hippy. They divorced years ago. He moved back to Amsterdam. That is when she stopped singing, I think.’

‘She had a daughter back in the early nineties. With Johan. She lives in Amsterdam now.’

‘Her name is Lieke. Lieke van der Berg. She is very successful. A musician. And a DJ. She still lives in Amsterdam but arrives to Ibiza every summer. She is…over there.’

‘Christina said there was nothing so calming in the world as diving. You forget everything in the water. She thought you would love it.’

‘Christina van der Berg’

You see, the problem was this: I sincerely believed I wasn’t a good person who deserved happiness.

‘She used to sit over there and tell people’s futures.’

‘She predicted her own death. She just didn’t know who was going to kill her. The police spoke to Alberto, and nothing happened to him. But…’

‘I think he is the one person who truly knows what happened to her.’

‘Alberto Ribas,’ he said. ‘Friend of the animals and the sea.’ ‘I’m Grace. Friend of a person who died in mysterious circumstances. I am trying to find out what happened to her.’

‘I was a maths teacher,’ I said, frustrated now. ‘I have a mind that likes to solve things. And I really want to know what happened to my friend, Christina van der Berg. I want to know how she died. And I think you might have some answers.’

‘I am seventy-two years old. I don’t do midnights. Or diving.’ ‘Nonsense. This is Ibiza. No one is too old for anything. There is a ninety-year-old who dances at Pacha every single night.’

The point of desperation is often the point of truth.

When things are wrong, we need to reach rock bottom in order for change to happen. We sometimes need to feel trapped in order to find the way out. We don’t meet ourselves in the light and air. We don’t understand the radio when the song is playing. We sometimes need to smash the thing to see how it is made.

‘Listen, there is currently another force on the island,’ Alberto said. ‘Not La Presencia but something we don’t understand yet. Something Christina only caught glimpses of.

‘Not magical powers. No magic. But powers, yes. Given to both of us by something that is extra-terrestrial. La Presencia. The presence. From Salacia.’

‘The name we give to the planet where the presence came from. It’s a good name, right? Roman goddess of the sea.’

After being told I was basically half-alien and that I had some sort of paranormal capabilities. The shock. The bewilderment. But mainly, I felt denial. I didn’t want to believe any of this.

‘Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.’

we are all stardust. The whole universe is inside us. Every element within us was made in a star. Nitrogen, calcium, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and all the other stuff. We are made of deep space and deep time and have been forged in supernovas (or supernovae, if we are being pretentious).

We have the unbreakable and the eternal inside us. We have the universe in our blood and bones.

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.

That is one great thing about having someone by your side. They are a shock absorber to the madness of experience.

‘Christina disappeared in the ocean on a moonless night. Do you know who else did that? Francisco Palau…And there are three hundred pages full of his own handwriting in this church. And yes, I want to know about La Presencia. Of course I do. But researching La Presencia is the exact same thing as researching what happened to Christina.

All reading, in short, is telepathy and all reading is time travel. It connects us to everyone and everywhere and every time and every imagined dream.

‘The theory,’ said Alberto, slowly, as if I was seven, ‘is that La Presencia is a very real presence full of powerful photons but also a wormhole. A wormhole is a connection between two places in the spacetime fabric.

The fisherman who was saved by La Presencia. He told his daughter that he was going away, to another world, and he wouldn’t be able to come back. He saw his own future in Salacia. And he disappeared one night, when he was old and ill, and he headed down towards La Presencia and he never came back. So, as far as we know, you can go through La Presencia but not back. And if Christina has gone to Salacia, it was via a one-way ticket.’

I want you to live, Grace. I want you to let go of your past and live. You need to do this. For the good of everything. Do you hear me?

And trust me, it isn’t so bad to be unique.

‘I am a flawed person.’ ‘For fuck’s sake, Grace. Everyone is a flawed person. That’s what being a person is.’

With an emerald, the more inclusions, the more cracks and defects, the more beautiful it can be. An authentic emerald is beautiful for its flaws. They call it perfect imperfection. Only a fake emerald can be conventionally perfect.’

‘Because it is the truth. The flawed truth of our love, perfect in its broken symmetry. I love you, Grace Winters, and the mistakes we made don’t make the love matter any less.’

‘Then, please, let go…You are not here to be perfect. None of us are. You are here to live. So let me go…’

‘Before I do, I just want to say I should have let you play your music louder. It was really great. I should have tried listening to it.’

Where there is life, there is possibility.’

I need to stay and be with you both. And enjoy whatever I have left. I would rather a single day on Earth than a lifetime elsewhere. This has been my paradise.’