The End of Loneliness

by Benedict Wells

I felt the deceptive elation of a young person who has not yet made any big mistakes in life.

He was so empty, so wonderfully empty. I could turn him into whatever I liked. And he didn’t have a single vulnerability. Nothing could hurt him. That fascinated me.”

She loved unconditionally, wasted herself unconditionally, failed unconditionally.

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

“You’re sleeping with a woman you love,” he said dully. “Everything you write now is either terrible or very good.”

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.

Of course I realize that these fantasies are childish. And yet I’m sure there must be a place in this universe from which you can look at both worlds and they’re both equally true. The real and the imagined. Because in a billion years, when everything’s gone and forgotten, when time has erased everything and there’s no proof anymore of anything whatsoever, what reality was will be irrelevant. Perhaps then the stories I invented in my head will have been just as real and unreal as what people have called 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? I often ask myself this. It would mean that while our perspective would change and we would distance ourselves from treasured memories, they would still be there, and if we could go back we would still find them in the same place.