The End of Loneliness

by Benedict Wells

clearly there were invisible forces and currents that could change everything at a stroke.

put on Pink Moon by Nick Drake,

And as soon as someone developed feelings for her, she quickly rejected him. As if something inside her had shattered, and anyone who got too close to her cut themselves on the shards. Then, at seventeen, she completely backed away from men. Any sort of approach seemed to absolutely disgust her, prompting rumours that she was more interested in women. Or was just weird. Alva didn’t care. Instead, she studied obsessively and read books on philosophy: Sartre, and a great deal of Kierkegaard.

Over the past few weeks I’d started writing again. It was as if the door to my childhood had sprung open; I’d realised that I enjoyed telling stories just as much as I had when I was ten.

I am my mother, watching her children play and grow older, and I hope I’ll get to keep them with me a little longer. And I’m content that I gave up my freedom for this life, even if I do sometimes miss it.

my son smiles for the first time. The smile comes suddenly, and it’s so disarming and beautiful that for a few seconds I’m not worried about him at all.

‘would it really be better if this world didn’t exist at all? Instead, we live, make art, love, observe, suffer, laugh and are happy. We all exist in a million different ways so that there is no void, and the price we pay for that is death.’

I glanced at her reddened face, and realised how much Alva loved literature, so much more than all the other people I knew. And the fact that she was sitting beside me and had been so moved by a story also moved me.

Go back, I thought. Become the person you used to be. Then I slipped. Only reflexes and luck kept me on my feet. My pulse throbbed in my throat. It was pointless. I carefully turned around and went back to Marty. Like a boxer staggering back to his corner, beaten by his younger self.

why do you so often long for solitude in company when you can scarcely bear to be alone any more?

Alva didn’t tear the wrapping paper but opened the present carefully, almost lovingly. She pulled out the Nick Drake album. ‘Pink Moon.’ ‘Do you remember?’ I asked.

We sat in silence. The initial excitement of seeing each other again had evaporated; it was all so formal, so forced. For a moment I felt as if our real selves were far away, and we’d sent two negotiators to the bar who weren’t authorised to talk about the really important things.

‘This one’s nice,’ she said, when I played her ‘Between The Bars’ by Elliott Smith. She beamed. ‘I really like this one.’

‘This constantly being alone is killing me.’ Alva: ‘Yes, but the antidote to loneliness isn’t just being around random people indiscriminately, the antidote to loneliness is emotional security.’

‘I mean, if you spend all your life running in the wrong direction, could it be the right one after all?’

‘Maybe you’re not writing on paper, but you’re doing it in your head,’ she said, in her quiet voice, and touched my arm. ‘You always have. You’re a rememberer and a preserver, you just can’t help it.’

in all these moments I could virtually see our past delicately reconnecting with our present and future.

My God, how this woman read! On steps, on chairs, on the floor – every spare minute she had a book in her lap.’

Time isn’t linear; nor is memory. You always remember more clearly things you’re emotionally close to at any given moment.

At Christmas, you always think last Christmas has only just been and gone, even though it’s twelve months ago. On the other hand, the summer just gone, which is actually six months closer, feels much further away.

Because when I spoke, I thought; and when I wrote, I felt.

Her eyes sparkled behind the lenses of her glasses, and as I gazed at her face – her white, delicate skin, her fine black lashes, the rich red of her hair – I was momentarily overwhelmed by her beauty.

I was never able to add anything to the ‘I hate you’, so it remained the last thing I said to my father before his death.

‘To find your true self you need to question everything you encountered at birth. And lose some of it, too, because often it’s only in pain that we discover what really belongs to us … It’s in the breaches that we recognize ourselves.’

Old age used to scare me, but now there was something reassuring in the thought of still living with her in forty years’ time. We’d sit together, read, talk or play chess; sometimes we’d tease each other, then we’d look back again on the treasury of memories we’d amassed together. I wondered what her face would look like with wrinkles, and how she would dress in her late seventies. In that moment I realised that none of this would matter to me, and the thought of growing old no longer held any fear.

At that moment it seemed incomprehensible to me that the life of this person, so close and familiar, this person whose breath, warmth, trauma I could feel, was in danger.

Life is not a zero-sum game. It owes us nothing, and things just happen the way they do. Sometimes they’re fair and everything makes sense; sometimes they’re so unfair we question everything. I pulled the mask off the face of Fate, and all I found beneath it was chance.

I smiled briefly, then was assaulted by fear, violent and physical, like a fist slamming repeatedly into my stomach. A pain that tied up the world in one big knot.

And then I thought about death, and how in the past I’d often imagined it as an infinite expanse, like a snowy landscape over which you flew. And where you touched that whiteness the emptiness was filled with the memories, feelings and pictures you carried within yourself, and it acquired a face. Sometimes what was created was so beautiful and strange that the soul dived in to linger there awhile before finally continuing on its passage through the void.

I hugged my daughter, then my son, ate a few mouthfuls, went to the bedroom and lay down on my side of the bed. The other side would now stay empty forever.

‘They’re only seven,’ I said. ‘In thirty years’ time they’ll hardly be able to remember their mother.’ ‘Then it’ll be up to you to tell them about her.’

‘And the two little ones,’ she said. ‘I wanted to watch them getting older. I would so have liked to talk to Luise when she reaches puberty and has problems. Or when Vincent falls in love for the first time.’ She reached for my hand. ‘You’re going to have to do that instead.’

‘I just thought about the frozen fox, exactly as you said I would.’ And a glimmer of her former smile appeared on her thin face.

The last time she opened her eyes was in the afternoon. She looked at me, and when she saw that I was weeping silently she seemed troubled, as if she blamed herself. And she squeezed my hand again, and then she closed her eyes once more. I could almost feel her thoughts racing through space and time, looking for one last treasure, one last beautiful moment she could hold on to. Perhaps she thought of the children and me, or of her sister and her parents, the past and the future. One last great explosion of thoughts and feelings, tangled fear and trust, and already it was flying away with her, astonishingly fast and strange and immeasurably far away.

Because of my accident the funeral took place without me: this is the first time I’ve stood at my wife’s grave. A plain black marble headstone, engraved with her name and the dates of her birth and death. A cipher for her story: Alva Moreau, 3.1.1973 – 25.8.2014.

I carry Vincent back to bed, tuck him in, feel a deep connection with him. I see myself in this boy so clearly it hurts.