How to Stop Time

by Matt Haig

‘The first rule is that you don’t fall in love,’ he said. ‘There are other rules too, but that is the main one. No falling in love. No staying in love. No daydreaming of love. If you stick to this you will just about be okay.’

the love of people is off limits. Do you hear me? Don’t attach yourself to people, and try to feel as little as you possibly can for those you do meet. Because otherwise you will slowly lose your mind . . .’

Yet. That word could trap you for decades.

Faces could lie easier than hands could.

For all his age and intelligence, Hendrich was fundamentally immature. He was a child. An incredibly ancient child.

I have been in love only once in my life. I suppose that makes me a romantic, in a sense. The idea that you have one true love, that no one else will compare after they have gone. It’s a sweet idea, but the reality is terror itself. To be faced with all those lonely years after. To exist when the point of you has gone. And my point, for a while, was Rose.

But this is how I remember these things, and all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.

Life had lost its value in the years away from her.

I remembered long walks back from Bankside, dodging the stray dogs and slithering in mud, comforted by nothing but the thought that she would be at the end of the journey home, and be the point of

She smiled a soft, troubled smile and I felt the whole world slipping away, and I wanted to slip with it, to go wherever she was going. I did not know how to be me, my strange and unusual self, without her. I had tried it, of course. I had existed whole years without her, but that was all it had been. An existence. A book with no words.

I pleaded with God, I asked and begged and bargained, but God did not bargain. God was stubborn and deaf and oblivious. And she died and I lived and a hole opened up, dark and bottomless, and I fell down and kept falling for centuries.

It occurred to me that human beings didn’t live beyond a hundred because they simply weren’t up for it. Psychologically, I mean. You kind of ran out. There wasn’t enough self to keep going. You grew too bored of your own mind. Of the way life repeated itself. How, after a while, there wasn’t a smile or gesture that you hadn’t seen before.

The purpose of science is to find out where the limits of possibility end. When we have achieved that – and we shall – there will be no more magic, no more superstition, there will just be what is.

If you live long enough you realise that every proven fact is later disproved and then proven again.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

And when I felt nothing I almost became nostalgic for the grief; at least when you felt pain you knew you were still alive.

I suppose the way I understand my life is as a kind of Russian doll, with different versions inside other versions, each one enclosing the other, whereby the life before isn’t seen from the outside but is still there.

I had to exist, I realised, because for pain to be felt there must be a living presence – a me – to feel it. And there was a reassurance in that knowledge, that proof of my own reality.

We stay the same glorified chimpanzees, just with ever bigger weapons.

But history you have lived is different to history you read in a book or on a screen. And some things in the past can’t be tamed.

The key to happiness wasn’t being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.

All you can do with the past is carry it around, feeling its weight slowly increase, praying it never crushes you completely.

You need to learn the art of discretion. Of speaking about a thing without actually speaking of it. Truth is a straight line you sometimes need to curve,

‘There have been times in my life when shooting myself in the head seemed profoundly preferable to the blessing of existence.’

That was the familiar lesson of time. Everything changes and nothing changes.

A boat has to stop eventually. It has to reach a port, a harbour, a destination, known or unknown. It has to get somewhere, and stop there, or what is the point of the boat?

You get to the point, after everything has happened to you, that nothing can surprise you.

‘Dreams are not to be believed. Especially the bad ones.’ I didn’t tell her the dream was a memory.

When I was with her, everything faded away and I felt calm. She was a counterbalance. She gave me peace just by looking at her, which might explain why I looked at her for too long, and with too much intensity in my eyes.

And she placed the lute beside her on the bed and kissed me and I closed my eyes and the rest of the world faded. There was nothing else. Nothing but her. She was the stars and the heavens and the oceans. There was nothing but that single fragment of time, and this bud of love we had planted inside it. And then, at some point after it started, the kiss ended, and I stroked her hair, and the church bells rang in the distance and everything in the world was in alignment.

‘Is this your Tom?’ Your Tom. It felt embarrassingly good. To know Rose had spoken of me. To feel as if I belonged to her. It made me feel solid, real, as if the space I occupied was meant to be occupied by me.

I could buy all the gold on the Strand and I would still rather be living in a small cottage on Well Lane if it meant living with you,

We kissed and I closed my eyes and inhaled lavender and her, and I felt so terrified and so in love that I realised they – the terror, the love – were one and the same thing.

every present moment is paying for a future one. Just one wrong turn can get you very lost. What you do in the present stays with you. It comes back. You don’t get away with anything.’

I have only been alive for four hundred and thirty-nine years, which is of course nowhere near long enough to understand the minimal facial expressions of the average teenage boy.

I felt alone. I needed to be around people, to mask the loneliness inside myself.

She looked like a child, I realised. They both did. They looked like children dressing up in grown-up clothes. There was such a fragile innocence to them.

It is strange how close the past is, even when you imagine it to be so far away. Strange how it can just jump out of a sentence and hit you. Strange how every object or word can house a ghost.

This is what playing the piano does. This is the danger of it. It makes you human.

I loved her, instantly. Of course, most parents love their children instantly. But I mention it here because I still find it a remarkable thing. Where was that love before? Where did you acquire it from? The way it is suddenly there, total and complete, as sudden as grief, but in reverse, is one of the wonders about being human.

‘If there is such a thing as good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.’

‘I quote others only in order the better to express myself,’

‘He wants to go to university. And do history. Which, you know, these days . . . it’s going to be expensive. But I want him to go. Which is why I am working every hour God sends. And God sends some crazy hours. But he’s determined. He wants to go.’

You can. You can run and run and run. You can run your entire life. You can run and change and keep running.’

But there is knowing something and knowing something.

She laughs. It is the simplest, purest joy on earth, I realise, to make someone you care about laugh.

Maybe that is what it takes to love someone. Finding a happy mystery you would like to unravel for ever.

For centuries I have thought all my despair is grief. But people get over grief. They get over even the most serious grief in a matter of years. If not get over then at least live beside. And the way they do this is by investing in other people, through friendship, through family, through teaching, through love.

what is the point of living when you have no one to live for?

Newton’s third law of motion. Actions create reactions. When things start to happen, other things start to happen. But sometimes it seems there is no explanation as to why the things are happening – why all the buses are coming along at once – why life’s moments of luck and pain arrive in clusters. All we can do is observe the pattern, the rhythm, and then live it.