The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

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.’

‘Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ‘is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely. Maybe you have a lack problem rather than a want problem. Maybe there is a life that you really want to live.’

‘Well, that you can choose choices but not outcomes.

When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person. But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.

That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living.

Every life she had tried so far since entering the library had really been someone else’s dream.

And when she thought of her root life, the fundamental problem with it, the thing that had left her vulnerable, really, was the absence of love.

And the thing that was wrong couldn’t be fixed because the flaw was the rightness itself. Everything was right, and yet she hadn’t earned this. She had joined the movie halfway. She had taken the book from the library, but truthfully, she didn’t own it.

It was interesting, she mused to herself, how life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it.