“I am almost a hundred years old; waiting for the end and thinking about the beginning.

“There are things I need to tell you, but would you listen if I told you how quickly time passes?

“I know that you are unable to imagine this.

“Nevertheless, I can tell you that you will awake someday to find that your life has rushed by at a speed once impossible and cruel. The most intense moments will seemed to have occurred only yesterday and nothing will have erased the pain and pleasure, the impossible intensity of love and its dog-leaping happiness, the deep blackness of passions unrequited, or unexpressed, or unresolved.

“And still the brain continues to yearn, continues to burn, foolishly with desire. My old man’s brain is mocked by a body that still longs to stretch in the sun and form a beautiful shape in someone else’s gaze, to lie under a blue sky and dream of helpless, selfless love, to behold itself, illuminated, in the golden light of another’s eyes.

“Time erodes us all.”

[“What I Was,” Meg Rosoff, p.205]