Page 200 - The Midnight Library

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e Many Lives of Nora Seed

Nora came to understand somet hing. Something Hugo had never fully

explained to her in that kitchen in Svalbard. You didn’t have to enjoy ever y
aspect of each life to keep having the option of experiencing them. You just
had to never give up on the idea that there would be a life somewhere that
could be enjoyed. Equally, enjoying a life didn’t mean you stayed in that life.
You only stayed in a life for ever if you couldn’t imagine a better one, and

yet, paradoxically, the more lives you tried the easier it became to think of
something better, as the imagination broadened a bit more with ever y new
life she sampled.

So, in time, and with Mrs Elm’s assistance, Nora took lots of books from
the shelves, and ended up having a taste of lots of different lives in her search
for the right one. She learned that undoing regrets was really a way of
making wishes come true. ere was almost any life she was living in one
universe, aer all.

In one life she had quite a solitar y time in Paris, and taught English at a
college in Montparnasse and cycled by the Seine and read lots of books on
park benches. In another, she was a yoga teacher with the neck mobility of

an owl.
In one life she had kept up swimming but had never tried to pursue the
Olympics. She just did it for fun. In that life she was a lifeguard in the beach
resort of Sitges, near Barcelona, was fluent in both Catalan and Spanish, and
had a hilarious best friend called Gabriela who taught her how to surf, and

who she shared an apartment with, five minutes from the beach.
ere was one existence where Nora had kept up the fiction writing she
had occasionally toyed with at university and was now a published author.