If you are told between life and death, there is a library, endless shelves filled with books: each book is a possibility of your life you could have lived differently. Would you take the chance to see how you could have undone all your regrets? Nora Seed did. The day she decided to die, she ends up in limbo, where she can experience how her other lives would have turned out.
Nora, despite being good at everything she did as a kid, considers her life has a full of disappointments and regrets. She has given up a lot of paths she could have taken to be better at life. She even bails out on her wedding two days prior and even bails on her best friend on the trip they planned to Australia.
Everything she does turns out to be pointless and depressing. Her cat dies, she gets fired from her job, her best friend ignores her messages, she loses every grip she thought she had for the word ultimately attempts to take her own life. That’s when she ends up in the limbo-like world: a library, where she gets to choose from an infinite number of books: all the possibilities to a second life.
However, as we all know, everything comes at a cost. The drawback is that once you experience disappointment in one of these lives, you return to the library and can never return to the same life. How many of these lives must she endure before she understands that “sometimes the only way to learn is to live.”
This is an issue that many of us, including myself, face. Constantly fretting about something I have no control over, or regretting my choices if the slightest disappointment sets in. Nora, a fictitious character, was given a second chance to choose a life worth experiencing, but in reality, we may not be given that opportunity.
“In the face of death, life seemed more attractive.” ~ The Midnight Library