The Midnight Library — The Other Side of Despair

The Other Side of Despair

‘Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ‘on the other side of despair.’ It wasn’t raining any more.

She was inside and sitting in a hospital bed. She had been put on a ward and had eaten and was feeling a lot better. The medical staff were pleased, following her physical examination. The tender abdomen was to be expected, apparently. She tried to impress the doctor by telling her a fact Ash had told her, about a stomach lining renewing itself every few days.

Then a nurse came and sat on her bed with a clipboard and went through reams of questions relating to her state of mind. Nora decided to keep her experience of the Midnight Library to herself because she imagined that it wouldn’t go down too well on a psychiatric evaluation form. It was safe to surmise the little-known realities of the multiverse probably weren’t yet incorporated within the care plans of the National Health Service.

The questions and answers continued for what felt like an hour. They covered medication, her mother’s death, Volts, losing her job, money worries, the diagnosis of situational depression. ‘Have you ever tried anything like this before?’ the nurse asked.

‘Not in this life.’ ‘And how do you feel right now?’ ‘I don’t know. A bit strange. But I don’t want to die any more.’ And the nurse scribbled on the form.

Through the window, after the nurse had gone, she watched the trees’ gentle movements in the afternoon breeze and distant rush-hour traffic shunt slowly along Bedford ring road. It was nothing but trees and traffic and mediocre architecture, but it was also everything.

It was life.

A little later she deleted her suicidal social media posts, and – in a moment of sincere sentimentality – she wrote something else instead. She titled it ‘A Thing I Have Learned (Written By A Nobody Who Has Been Everybody)’.