Torrential Rain, The Midnight Library, and me.

CW: mentions of suicide. Just letting you know in case you don’t feel like reading something that heavy right now. To let you know, though, this post is hopeful and full of joy and a lust for life. Much like The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, about which, sort of, this post is written.

Yesterday, the heavens opened. I was walking up some street with no name by Galeries Lafayette and the heavens officially opened right up dumping what felt to me like a whole ocean of water onto the streets of Paris. I could have felt like I was drowning in my shoes, but I somehow didn’t. It reminded me of the rain in New York one May afternoon, or the late June Mississippi heat, or the rain I felt in the south of France at 13, or once in London riding my bike freewheeling down the hill in Greenwich park in a colossal storm, or the lightening storm I watched from my bedroom window when I was five. The whole thing felt hilarious, the rain hitting the tops of me like tight snare drums, awakening something beautiful and wholly undiscovered until their slight touch appeared there to greet it. I laughed in the street. To a couple sheltering under a McDonalds parasol I offered a friendly Bonsoir. I saluted a man waiting in his doorway who shrugged at me as if to say “why” to whom I replied with an answering gesture with which I meant to say “why not”. I smiled at everyone. Some of them smiled back.

Something happened under the rain that I’m not sure how to explain. If I were still religious I might relate it to an odd kind of baptism, but I’m not still religious and so I can’t really. I feel like I stepped out from the awning of the shop, into the deluge, and entered my home clean, fresh, new. Thinking about it again now I feel like crying. 

Depression is a funny thing, isn’t it? I’ve been known to say once a depressive, always a depressive. A therapist I had once likened it to an addiction; that your brain learns a way of dealing with emotions that are too intense by filtering them into the state of the depressive, and that’s why it can feel so hard to break that cycle. In a way, I think that must always be the case. To have been depressed is to know how it is to have felt that way. But today, following a weekend that has been open like a new morning, I think I feel something akin to a true and unbridled hope. 

It’s fathers day, so it might feel weird for your resident dead dad gal to be writing about hope and positive futures on today of all days, but something has shifted. Something has changed. I have changed. 

This morning I woke up and walked out into the bright Parisian morning, the rain abated and no longer falling, the sky broken like breakfast and the colour of freshly washed sheets. For some reason the trees smelled like sugar, and the air instead of being ridden with that slightly pissy Parisian smell had benefited from nature’s street washing by smelling faintly of freshness with an undertone of petrichor. I went for coffee with a friend and bought pastries and drank fresh orange juice in the bright June sunlight, eyes squinting at the reality of it all. 

After the coffee I sat in a park shaded by the easy shifting light of the sun rippling through thick leaves, looking north across the Ile St Louis towards the Notre Dame and realised how lucky I am to be here. This might feel smug, and I’m so sorry if it does, but I feel an unfamiliar loosening in my chest that might be akin to happiness and I’m not sure it sits easily with me, and so I want to express it here. I walked into Shakespeare & Company to pick up Watership Down for a friend (probably more on that another time) and there on the table in the middle of the shop, perhaps as though waiting for me was Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library. 

I’ve read one of his books before (How to Stop Time, if you’re interested) and I’d been hearing things about this one floating around and I remembered a friend of mine being sort of snide about the writing, and I remembered how I’d actually really enjoyed How to Stop Time, and so without really thinking much more about it I’d reached out and picked up the book for myself, carried it around in my bag with me until I got home and promptly started reading it in my bed at 9:30. By 17 minutes past twelve I’d finished it. For those who’ve read the book that felt a little bit too close for comfort. 

The first line of the book starts like this: “Nineteen years before she decided to die, Nora Seed sat in the warmth of the small library at Hazeldene school in the town of Bedford.” 

That’s it. That’s all it took to get me to sit still for three hours and read a book from cover to cover. No breaks, no distractions, nothing. I’ve not sat and read a book like that for years. I thought that I’d forgotten how. I thought I didn’t love books anymore or that, like, the love and passion i had for stories and new worlds had been worn away by stepping into the shoes laid out for me by adulthood, and life, and the simple facts of existing. 

It was the ‘before she decided to die’ that got me, because in that simple phraseology I recognised something. The decisive nature of it. The methodical cleanness with which that decision can feel like it might be… if not easy, then perfectly logical.

The basic premise of the book is this: Nora is depressed. Nora decides to die, and once she’s tried to she ends up in an infinite library full of books full of all of the infinite possibilities of lives she might have lived. In one her dad hasn’t died, in another she achieves the dream of being an olympian, in another an antarctic researcher, in another a world famous rockstar, in another happily married with a family, and many other iterations of a life lived. 

When I am at my lowest I rifle back through the pages of my life searching for all of the things I did wrong. I focus on every time I didn’t tell my friends how much I appreciated them, or I focus on every embarrassing moment. I think about how I didn’t tell my dad I loved him enough even though I was only 8 and I probably told him as much as any 8 year old can. I think about how lonely I feel sometimes, and I think about how maybe any one of those infinite lives I might have lived would be better than the life I’m living now. 

Yesterday, under siege by raindrops burrowing their way through the fabric of my clothes to reach my skin, I felt the inescapable, and indescribable feeling of possibility. Not for the lives that might be lived, but for the life I was living right there and then. I went home and wrote feverishly for about 6 hours in the same way that I came home and read feverishly for three today. I’ve written about rain here so many times I’ve lost count, about how it connects us to our homes, and to each other. It struck me, on starting The Midnight Library that Haig’s first chapter is titled: ‘A conversation about rain’, because I find myself talking so often about the weather. I think it’s the way we most easily relate to each other: by talking about our environments. 

In the book I wrote, Spectral Weathers, which may still as yet amount to nothing, I spent a long time talking about how weather is an always already spectral thing. It conjures ghosts, and transports us sometimes elsewhere so that we might become ghosts too. When it rains we’re almost transported through the water to every time it has rained, and every time it will rain, simply through the power of remembering. I wonder if this means that all weather has a kind of conjuring magic in it. I can’t help but think of Kate Bush’s ‘Cloud Busting’: every time it rains/ you’re here in my head/ like the sun coming out.

I’ve felt, for a lot of my life, like Haig’s Nora in The Midnight Library. As though, for all my potential, I haven’t amounted to anything and never will. In 2018 I truly believed that a life ended full of the unrealised potential of becoming was better than the life lived that never amounted to anything. I thought that if I died in that summer, with all of the possibility of what I might have been ahead of me then people could say: there goes Lucy, she could have been anything. In reading the book I was reminded that there really isn’t anything better than the life lived: ‘you don’t have to understand life, you just have to live it’ feels apt here (and I’ve stolen it from Haig).

SPOILERS: In the end the life Nora seeks isn’t the one full of glitz and glamour, isn’t righting the wrongs of all her regrets. Instead it’s the life she’d wanted to get out of. It’s the slow realisation that we are loved, and can find love in our lives from a multitude of places. When everything feels like it’s gone wrong, it still has the potential to go right. That’s the important word I want to stress, here: potential. 

Because if I had died in 2018 full of potential, then I wouldn’t be here in this beautiful city getting rained on, or sitting under the dappled shade of gently shifting june trees. I wouldn’t be listening to birdsong and talking about Paris with a houseless lady on a bench at lunchtime. I wouldn’t have learned French, I wouldn’t have met my new friends, I wouldn’t be able to call up my friends at home and love and feel loved by them, and I wouldn’t be feeling this strange and wholly welcome loosening in my chest after what feels like a winter that has spanned from, at the very least March 2020. In reality I wonder if this winter has been sitting inside of me for a very long time, waiting for something to crack it open. To let the frost thaw, and new growth begin to inch its way out of the shell. 

Depression is a liminal state. Hovering between something and something else: I’ve never quite managed to figure out what. I wonder if Depression is actually the Library itself, all the possible lives you might have lived encroaching upon and haunting the life you’re actually living now. Every shadow of the unchoices you didn’t make, coming back to taunt you that “things might have been better”. They might also have been worse. They might have made no difference at all. 

I think I may have rambled on enough for tonight, but I would advocate for reading The Midnight Library. I enjoyed it a lot, and I think anyone who has felt like this might enjoy it too. 

In the meantime, I’d like to end by saying that things will eventually get better. They can and will. Life is not meant to be wasted potential that other people talk about. Instead it’s supposed to be the messy reality of your own human experience: of what it is to be the collection of atoms that make up you on this spinning rock of improbability. That’s a bit purple, that prose there, but I’ve got my purple light on by my bed so I thought I’d say it.

I guess if Matt Haig’s book feels a bit predictable then that’s because the answer is kind of predictable… life is probably better if you’re living it. Maybe if you’d caught me on a different day, or if I’d read it on Friday, I’d feel differently. But I don’t. We interact with art based on the way we’re feeling when it reaches us. The art is shaped by our reading of it in as much as it exists without us. The two things need eachother: the art and the audience.

If you’re feeling low: the world is a better place with you in it, even if you don’t realise it. You are loved, and enough, just as you are. You should stick around to see what all that potential has in store.

Good night, and take care.