The End of Loneliness

by Benedict Wells

My father said: “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.”

Dear Stéphane, this camera is for you. It’s to remind you of who you are, and of what life must never be allowed to destroy. Please try to understand me.

These thoughts drove thorns into my world, and the more often I contemplated them, the bigger the gulf between me and my often carefree, cheerful fellow students. I was alone. And then I met Alva.

Alva nodded, and for a long time—an unusually long time—she looked into my eyes, and I’ll never forget how in doing so we were able to glimpse each other’s inner worlds.

It was like before, except that nothing was like before any longer.

my childhood, when I was always the center of attention. And had such tremendous energy. When exactly did I lose all that?

Never had the courage to win her, only ever the fear of losing her.

“We were all hurting back then,” she said, “and we all reacted differently. I made sure nothing was ever calm again, that my mind never had a chance to be still. I threw myself into life the way I did because whenever I sat alone in my room and thought about things, all I wanted to do was cry my eyes out.”

As I walked into the garden, I nodded at my brother. A difficult childhood is like an invisible enemy, I thought. You never know when it will strike.

I didn’t choose Marty, and in fact we’re completely different, but one thing sets him apart from all other people: he’s always there. For forty-one years, at my side.

Sometimes, back then, I used to lie down beside her and try to turn her pages by blowing on them. That had always coaxed a smile from her; but one afternoon Alva had reacted irritably. She was clutching her book with both hands; a beloved character was obviously dying between her fingers. It was only then that I noticed she was crying. I hadn’t meant to disturb her, yet I couldn’t alter the fact that I was sharing this intimate moment with her. I glanced at her reddened face, and realized 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.

I realized, with a sense of physical pain, that I had not used my time. Had fought for minutes when trying to catch a bus; wasted years because I hadn’t done what I wanted to do.

“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.”

The first days with Alva felt like coming home after a long journey. All those moments from our youth meant so much more to me than everything that had come afterward;

“So you know that feeling,” I said calmly, “when life has been poisoned by something, right from the start. Like black liquid poured into a basin of clean water.”

Actually, the reason I was always reading was simply to escape, to let myself be comforted by a few sentences or a story. When I was younger I wanted more than anything to be a character in a novel. To be immortal and live forever in a book, then everyone can read me and watch me from the outside.

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

still didn’t imagine that Romanov’s condition would deteriorate so fast, not even when he let the bath overflow twice within a fairly short space of time because he’d forgotten he intended to bathe. He was an expert at hiding his true condition. A house with the facade still intact while everything inside was collapsing.

“Trust me.” She gave me a kiss. “The next few years are ours.” I lifted our daughter out of bed. Still an overwhelming feeling to hold one of the babies in my arms. As if the brightest part of me shone not in me anymore, but in them. “Did you hear that?” I whispered in Luise’s ear. “The next few years are ours.”

“That’s such feeble nonsense, Marty. Sorry, but fuck contentment. I want excitement, tension, a challenge.

her. Suddenly that line appeared between her eyebrows; she stared blankly into the distance and chewed her finger, lost in thought. I loved it when she had that air of industrious concentration. For a long time now I’d been able to tell from the set of her shoulders if she was tense; but the way she’d left the door ajar indicated that she wanted company. There was a familiarity between us that seemed infinite, like two mirrors reflecting one another.

immutable element

“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.”