Cat's Eye

by Margaret Atwood

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.

You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

We’re impervious, we scintillate, we are thirteen.

Vanity is becoming a nuisance; I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I’m not ready for that yet.

This is the middle of my life. I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I’m supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I’m supposed to be a person of substance.

In my dreams of this city I am always lost.

This goes along with another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.