I find that the best fiction tends to be so hyper focused on saying one particular thing, that it becomes about everything. A human experience. The condition of life. In this case: time. Our relationship to it; the process of constructing a life that I consider destiny or fate—man made, but robbed by puritans and given to god, as all Good things are. Sacrificed.

This narrative reclaims that power and gives it back to the people. The effect that someone who you don’t remember for ages and ages can have on you. So much time has passed and your grey matter hasn’t made an association. But then, something happens and you’re right there. Connected. Both embodied and apart from who you were, while being the product of those inconsequential moments.

The gravitas that every single chapter is built around is simply staggering. It says that what we do matters. We make and destroy lives at a granular level. While the goon comes for everyone, and some of these moments are irreparably sad—life and death stakes, playing for keeps with a throwaway comment or a squeezing of a hand, the compromise that settles and settled in the dregs of your soul. It also means that there is an inherent, beautiful and wondrous agency to the small creatures of our burgeoning lives.

Nostalgia lives here, sure, but for once it isn’t trite.