The life that did not happen

The light has moved across the room while you were somewhere else.

You were in the other one again. You go there several times a day and it takes no time at all.

In the other one it went differently.

Which fork it was is yours. You know exactly where it is and you have never once had to look for it. Or there was no fork at all and it was simply luck, and the other one is where the lorry came through the junction four seconds later and everything after that is different.

And it is specific. That is the part people do not understand. It is not a vague better life. It has a room in it, and a particular light, and a sound you would know anywhere.

The fork was real. This is not a book that tells you the road you did not take was the worse road. Nobody knows that, including you, and a book that pretended to know would be no use to you by the foot of the page. You may well have chosen wrongly. People do.

And the wanting is not going to be called ingratitude here. That charge is not brought on this page in either direction — not about what you had, and not about what you wanted instead.

Nothing has ever happened in it.

Not one thing. No morning in it has ever had to be got through. Nobody in it has been ill on a wet Tuesday in February, or waited in all day for somebody who did not come, or run short at the end of a month, because there has never been a Tuesday in it at all.

It has never been tested. Not once.

That is the only claim this chapter makes about it, and it is not a reason to stop going there.

And it is not a memory, although it behaves in every way like one.

There is nothing to point at. There is nobody to show. It did not leave anything behind it, because it never happened, and that is precisely why it cannot be handed to anybody and why nobody has ever got near it.

Say any part of it out loud and it arrives at the other end as something else — as a man complaining about a decent life, or fishing for something, or being hard on people who are not there to answer back. So it has stayed where it is.

Nothing is asked of you here. This chapter does not tell you to stop, it does not say the other one is a fantasy, and it is not going to be settled on this page.

Nobody has ever asked you about it. You would not know where to begin.