This Time Next Year

by Sophie Cousens

If you lived in a city for long enough, Minnie thought, the streets and the places where life happens fold inward like paper, making space for new memories. Yet visiting old haunts and a long-forgotten road was like stretching the concertina out again—the memories leap out, fresh as the day you folded them away.

“Don’t cry about something you wouldn’t cry about in five years’ time,” she once told Minnie.

“I find places like this so packed with memories. Visiting them can be like opening a memory jar. You take off the lid and the smells and sounds of a place hit you, unlocking things folded away deep in your brain,” Minnie said,

Life is full of times you have to turn toward the storm, and life brings many storms. Sick children, parents dying, cancer, just the challenge of building a life together and not driving each other completely nuts. You need a man who’ll turn in to the storm with you

“Life is change—if nothing’s changing, you aren’t living.”