The Midnight Library

Nora wakes up in her root life, shortly after midnight in her flat. She immediately vomits and feels physically terrible, still suffering from her overdose, but she knows that she’s made it—she’s alive. She staggers out of her flat, croaking for help. She reaches Mr. Banerjee’s house next door, and he calls an ambulance for her before she collapses on his front porch. The next thing she knows, she’s lying in a hospital bed. A nurse asks her questions about her life and mental state, and Nora refrains from mentioning the Midnight Library but says she no longer wants to die. She appreciates the simple sight of traffic and rustling leaves outside her window, relieved to be alive. She deletes her last few suicidal social media posts and composes a new one.

In her new post, Nora discusses how easy it is to regret one’s decisions and yearn for other, seemingly better versions of reality. She admits that other, parallel lives do exist somewhere, but she emphasizes that there’s no way of knowing if those lives are better or worse. She names regret as the true problem, as regret makes it much harder to appreciate the only present, accessible life that people have. She insists that a person only needs to experience one life and one self; it’s impossible to do everything, but everyone has infinite potential within them to do anything. Nora admits that she doesn’t expect her life to magically become perfect or free from hardship, but she firmly and confidently wants to live her life anyway.