The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

Happy moments can turn into pain, given time.

‘I regret feeling so much guilt.’

she wondered if her parents had ever been in love or if they had got married because marriage was something you did at the appropriate time with the nearest available person. A game where you grabbed the first person you could find when the music stopped. She had never wanted to play that game.

And yet she picked it. Because of some strange predictive homesickness that festered alongside a depression that told her, ultimately, she didn’t deserve to be happy.

Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing, and since discovering that she had never entirely trusted her memories.

‘It’s hard to predict, isn’t it?’ she asked, looking blankly in front of her as she moved a black bishop across the board to take a white pawn. ‘The things that will make us happy.’

I have carefully calculated that the pain of me living as the bloody disaster that is myself is greater than the pain anyone else will feel if I were to die.

‘Because, Nora, sometimes the only way to learn is to live.’ ‘Sounds hard.’

The thing she had once loved about swimming was the disappearing. In the water, her focus had been so pure that she thought of nothing else. Any school or home worries vanished. The art of swimming – she supposed like any art – was about purity. The more focused you were on the activity, the less focused you were on everything else. You kind of stopped being you and became the thing you were doing.

Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don’t even try to change. Maybe that was most lives.

Because too often our view of success is about some external bullshit idea of achievement – an Olympic medal, the ideal husband, a good salary. And we have all these metrics that we try and reach. When really success isn’t something you measure, and life isn’t a race you can win.

this has come to save me . . . I wanted to be somewhere he had never been. I wanted somewhere where I didn’t have to feel his ghost.

On both sides of her family there had been an unspoken belief that life was meant to fuck you over.

Maybe that’s what all lives were, though. Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty.

Was this what fame was like? Like a permanent bittersweet cocktail of worship and assault?

but they say sibling rivalry isn’t about siblings but parents,

But entering a life wasn’t the same as entering an emotion.

‘The fun is in the jumping, mon amie.’ ‘But what if it’s in the landing?’

Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever.

There was more to her than a flat line of mild to moderate depression, spiced up with occasional flourishes of despair.