Wikipedia suggests a theory called ‘general systems collapse’， whereby ‘centralisation, specialisation, complexity, and top-heavy political structure’ made Late Bronze Age civilisation particularly vulnerable to breakdown. Another of the theories is headlined simply: ‘Climate change’。 I think this puts our present civilisation in a kind of ominous light, don’t you? General systems collapse is not something I had ever really thought about as a possibility before. Of course I know in my brain that everything we tell ourselves about human civilisation is a lie. But imagine having to find out in real life.
Unrelatedly, and in fact so unrelatedly that it comes in at a sharp ninety-degree angle to my last paragraph, do you ever think about your biological clock? Not that I’m saying you should, I’m just wondering if you do. We are still pretty young, obviously. But the fact is that the vast majority of women throughout human history had already had several children by the time they reached our age. Right? I guess there’s no good way of checking that. I’m not even sure if you want to have children, now that I think of it. Do you? Or maybe you don’t know one way or another. As a teenager I thought I would rather die than have babies, and then in my twenties I vaguely assumed it was something that would just happen to me eventually, and now I’m about to turn thirty, I’m starting to think: well? There isn’t anyone queuing up to help me fulfil this biological function, needless to say. And I also have a weird and completely unexplained suspicion that I might not be fertile. There is no medical reason for me to think this. I mentioned it to Simon recently, in the course of complaining to him about my various other unsubstantiated medical anxieties, and he said he didn’t think I needed
to worry about that one, because in his opinion I have a ‘fertile look’。 That made me laugh for like a day. I’m actually still laughing about it while I’m writing this email to you. Anyway, I’m just curious to know your thoughts. Considering the approaching civilisational collapse, maybe you think children are out of the question anyway.
I’m probably thinking about all this now because I saw Aidan randomly on the street the other day and immediately had a heart attack and died. Every subsequent hour since I saw him has been worse than the last. Or is it just that the pain I feel right now is so intense that it transcends my ability to reconstruct the pain I felt at the time?
Presumably, remembered suffering never feels as bad as present suffering, even if it was really a lot worse – we can’t remember how much worse it was, because remembering is weaker than experiencing. Maybe that’s why middle-aged people always think their thoughts and feelings are more important than those of young people, because they can only weakly remember the feelings of their youth while allowing their present experiences to dominate their life outlook. Still, my intuition is that I actually feel worse now, two days after seeing Aidan, than I felt in the moment of seeing him. I know that what happened between us was just an event and not a symbol – just something that happened, or something he did, and not an inevitable manifestation of my failure in life generally. But when I saw him, it was like going through it all over again. And Alice, I do feel like a failure, and in a way my life really is nothing, and very few people care what happens in it. It’s so hard to see the point sometimes, when the things in life I think are meaningful turn out to mean nothing, and the people who are supposed to love me don’t. I have tears in my eyes even typing this stupid email, and I’ve had nearly six months to get over it. I’m starting to wonder if I just never will. Maybe certain kinds of pain, at certain formative stages in life, just impress themselves into a person’s sense of
self permanently. Like the way I didn’t lose my virginity until I was twenty and it was so painful and awkward and bad, and since then I’ve always felt like exactly the kind of person that would happen to, even though before then I didn’t. And now I just feel like the kind of person whose life partner would fall out of love with them after several years, and I can’t find a way not to be that kind of person anymore.
Are you working on anything new out there in the middle of nowhere? Or just taking recalcitrant local boys out on dates? I miss you! All my love. E.
5
In the chilled section of a convenience shop, Felix was browsing a selection of ready meals with a slightly unfocused look on his face. It was three o’clock in the afternoon on a Thursday and white light fixtures hummed overhead. The doors at the front of the shop parted but he didn’t turn around. He replaced a ready meal on a shelf and took out his phone. There were no new notifications. Inexpressively he put the device back in his pocket, lifted a plastic box off the shelf as if at random, walked over to the till, and paid.