Page 203 - The Midnight Library

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politician, a lawyer, a shoplier, the head of an ocean protection charity, a

shop worker (again), a waitress, a first-line super visor, a glass-blower and a
thousand other things. She’d had horrendous commutes in cars, on buses, in
trains, on ferries, on bike, on foot. She’d had emails and emails and emails.
She’d had a fiy-three-year-old boss with halitosis touch her leg under a

table and text her a photo of his penis. She’d had colleagues who lied about
her, and colleagues who loved her, and (mainly) colleagues who were
entirely indifferent. In many lives she chose not to work and in some she
didn’t choose not to work but still couldn’t find any. In some lives she

smashed through the glass ceiling and in some she just polished it. She had
been excessively over- and under-qualified. She had slept brilliantly and
terribly. In some lives she was on anti-depressants and in others she didn’t
even take ibuprofen for a headache. In some lives she was a physically

healthy hypochondriac and in some a seriously ill hypochondriac and in
most she wasn’t a hypochondriac at all. ere was a life where she had
chronic fatigue, a life where she had cancer, a life where she’d suffered a
herniated disc and broken her ribs in a car accident.

ere had, in short, been a lot of lives.
And among those lives she had laughed and cried and felt calm and
terrified and ever ything in between.
And between these lives she always saw Mrs Elm in the librar y.

And at first it seemed that the more lives she experienced, the fewer
problems there seemed to be with the transfer. e librar y never felt like it
was on the brink of crumbling or falling apart or at risk of disappearing
completely. e lights didn’t even flicker through many of the changeovers.

It was as though she had reached some state of acceptance about life – that if
there was a bad experience, there wouldn’t only be bad experiences. She
realised that she hadn’t tried to end her life because she was miserable, but
because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of

her miser y.
at, she supposed, was the basis of depression as well as the difference
between fear and despair. Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and
worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed

and locked behind you.
But with ever y life she saw that met aphorical door widen a little further as
she grew better at using her imagination. Sometimes she was in a life for less