"Nothing now will ever match it"

The sigh has a second half, and it's the half that does the damage. Not that it was good then, but that nothing now, or later, will be as good. The best has happened. What's left is the rest.

Notice what kind of statement that is. It sounds like a forecast, but it's a comparison, and it's the comparison from chapter 3. Today, hot, with its problems in, against nineteen ninety-six, cooled, with its problems out. Of course today doesn't match. Nothing could. If you took nineteen ninety-six itself, as it was lived, with the rent and the bad back and the friend who'd gone quiet, and put it next to the golden version of nineteen ninety-six, it wouldn't match either. The golden version beats everything, including the year it's a picture of.

There's a second unfairness in the comparison and it's worth naming. The golden version is made of the peaks. The wedding, the beach, the night everyone stayed up. The present is being judged on a Tuesday. Today is a Tuesday with a work thing and a dentist and a slightly disappointing lunch, and it's being set against the best afternoon of a whole decade, which is not a fair match, and the Tuesday from nineteen ninety-six that you don't remember, because it was a Tuesday, would have lost just as badly.

Now run the fade forward. In twenty years, today will have cooled. The dentist will have gone, the work thing will have gone, the slightly disappointing lunch will have gone entirely, and what will be left is whatever was good in it, which you may not have noticed, because you were busy sighing about nineteen ninety-six. There will be a photograph from this year on a fridge in twenty thirty-six, and someone will look at it while the kettle boils and feel warm and then sad, and the sentence will come. It'll never be like that again. About now. About the year you're currently writing off.

So "nothing now will match it" is true in the way that no live thing matches a photograph, and false as a forecast, because the forecast is being made by an instrument that can't see the present's good until the present has become the past. The good is there. It's hot and mixed in with the problems, the way nineteen ninety-six's was, and chapter 22 is about learning to see it before the fade does the work for you.