Still Here

Well. This used to be a locked chapter.

Now it has an opening sentence, which is already behind us, and apparently enough confidence to begin a second paragraph. A little space in a list has become somewhere you can spend part of your day.

You may have come straight from Chapter Three. You may have left the book for a while and done an unreasonable number of things before returning. I can’t tell how much life fits between your page turns.

Either way, here you are. Possibly in a different chair. Possibly with an entirely different opinion of the book. I hope the chair is comfortable, at least.

We’ve spent three chapters visiting the present, the past, and the future. There is one small complication we haven’t given much space to: you can be reading about being here while thinking about something else.

I could be losing you to a shopping list right now. It wouldn’t even need to be a particularly good one.

Perhaps you’ve had the experience of reaching the bottom of a page and discovering you have no idea what it said. Your eyes did their part. You distinctly remember moving them. Somewhere along the way, though, a thought opened a side door and most of you went through it.

You were remembering a conversation, or wondering whether you replied to a message. Then another thought followed, and by the time you noticed, you were three streets away from whatever the author was trying to do.

I try not to take this personally. I’ve mentioned your tongue before. My own contribution to keeping you on track has been mixed.

The interesting bit is the return. There isn’t always a grand decision to pay attention. Sometimes you simply realise you’ve been elsewhere, and there the page is again, halfway through a sentence that has been doing its best without you.

You may have to read it twice. The sentence won’t mind. It has very little else scheduled.

Let me put something on the page and see whether it follows you off it.

You should be doing something else.

I have no idea whether that’s true. I don’t know what you have to do today, or whether this is the first quiet moment you’ve had. It’s a remarkably uninformed sentence.

Still, perhaps something came to mind. An unfinished job. A message. That small household task you’ve been avoiding so long it has started to feel like a member of the family.

Or perhaps you thought, no, actually, I’m allowed to read a book. Perfectly reasonable. You don’t need to submit your reasons, although I notice I managed to get myself involved in the discussion without knowing anything about it.

The words are sitting here on the page. If a task came to mind, it may now feel a little closer than it did before. I haven’t changed its deadline. I haven’t even found out what it is.

What happened to that sentence?

You may have done something else entirely. Three buttons are a rather small container for a person’s afternoon.

A sentence can meet a task you’ve been avoiding and sound authoritative. It can meet a well-earned break and sound rude. It can arrive while you’re wondering what to have for dinner and fail to get a hearing at all.

The wording hasn’t changed between those possibilities. What it meets in you matters.

And sometimes the thought is useful. Perhaps you really did forget something. You can go and do it; the book doesn’t need to win an argument with your actual life.

But there may also be occasions when a familiar sentence arrives, sounds convincing for a moment, and then leaves you sitting exactly where you were. Nothing required your reply after all.

The sentences that come from inside can be harder to question. They don’t have quotation marks around them, and they tend to use your voice.

“I’m terrible at this,” for example, can arrive after one difficult attempt with the confidence of someone who has reviewed your entire career. It rarely brings the paperwork either.

You may know a sentence like that. Perhaps it turns up when you meet new people, begin something unfamiliar, or try to follow instructions that were clearly written for a different species of human.

The sentence may have a history. There may be something true in it. But “I’m having trouble with this bit” leaves quite a different amount of room from “I’m terrible at this.” One difficult afternoon can grow surprisingly large when the wording allows it.

Books should probably be careful here. We spend a lot of time putting sentences into people and then leaving before we find out what they do with them.

I would prefer not to become another voice telling you that you’re doing being a person incorrectly. You probably have enough material.

And now you’re somewhere on this page. Perhaps you’ve followed every word, or perhaps something I wrote sent you off into an example of your own. You don’t need to reconstruct the route you took to reach this sentence.

The surface beneath your hand is still there. There may be a sound nearby that has nothing to do with the book. If a thought from a moment ago is still hanging around, the sound doesn’t have to wait for it to finish.

There seems to be room for both. A thought about somewhere else, and a little of wherever you actually are.

You haven’t had to get rid of anything to carry on reading. Even an opinion of this chapter can come along, though I would appreciate it keeping its voice down during the better passages.

When I called this chapter Still Here, I didn’t mean you had to hold your attention perfectly still. I couldn’t reasonably ask that of someone I’ve just distracted with a shopping list and an imaginary obligation.

I meant the page would be here when you noticed it again.

There is a Chapter Five. It has a title, Says Who?, and a lock. This time the empty chapter really is empty. I’m aware we’ve made a habit of ending at a door we haven’t built the room behind.

The title seems a fair question after a chapter like this. I’ve been making observations about your thoughts, and you may have found some of them familiar. Others may not fit at all. I get to sound certain simply by leaving out a few words and putting a full stop at the end.

That’s a useful thing to know about a voice, including this one.

You can disagree with something here and still turn the page. You can find a sentence helpful without taking on everything else the book says. Our arrangement has always allowed that, even before we installed buttons for your objections.

For now, this is where the words end. Whatever you do next will happen without me describing it, which must come as something of a relief.

I’ll leave you to it. You know where to find me.