The End of Loneliness

by Benedict Wells

“The most important thing is that you find your true friend, Jules.” He realized that I didn’t understand, and gave me a penetrating look. “Your true friend is someone who’s always there, who walks beside you all your life. You have to find them; it’s more important than anything, even love. Because love doesn’t always last.”

A difficult childhood is like an invisible enemy, I thought. You never know when it will strike.

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

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

“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.”

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 want to be wherever you are, and that is—reality.

What if there’s no such thing as time? If everything we experience is eternal, and it’s not time that passes us by, but we ourselves that pass by the things we experience?

Things come and go. For a very long time I couldn’t accept this. Now, suddenly, I find it easy.