The End of Loneliness

by Benedict Wells

You were and remained whoever the others thought you were.

All this has been sown in me, but I can’t see what it’s making of me. The harvest only comes when I’m grown-up, and then it’s too late.”

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

“I’ll drop dead before I’ll play that bloody song.” Liz studied her fingernails. “I used to hate it so much.” “You loved it,” said Marty quietly. “We all loved it.”

I thought Marty would annoy me, but he turns out to be the truth-teller in the novel. He was my favorite character, actually.

“But what if we don’t know each other anymore when we’re thirty?” “That can never happen.” She gave me a long look. “Things like that can always happen.”

“Jules, you always see this person in me that isn’t who I am.” “No—other way round. You are the person you don’t see.”

But really I just loved being a child. I loved talking nonsense, cuddling Mama, sitting in my room for hours drawing. I didn’t want to grow up; certainly not that fast. And then

down the cue. “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. At Christmas,

Memories of things that are emotionally similar to the present take a kind of short cut.

“The question is, what wouldn’t be different? What would be the immutable part of you? The bit that would stay the same in every life, no matter what course it took. Are there elements in us that survive everything?”

. . . Kierkegaard says the self must be broken in order to become itself.”

Then at some point we say, ‘I am such-and-such,’ as if it’s something that can be taken for granted, but we just mean the surface, the primary self.” She sat down on my desk. “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.”

And they need someone who will guide them through everything on this new and difficult track, and that someone is going to be me. And I realize that perhaps I am the right person for this after all, because I’ve been through it before.