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.

“We have a saying in France, ‘À chaque oiseau son nid est beau’—the bird loves his own nest. You don’t know any other nest, Minnie. You must spread your wings and learn to fly.”

“Be a good companion to yourself and you will never be lonely.” It was one of Leila’s highest aspirations: self-sufficiency.

“Better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you’re not.”

“Don’t cry about something you wouldn’t cry about in five years’ time,”

“I don’t think the scale of other people’s problems makes your own any easier to live with.”

“If you kiss a man and he runs a mile, he’s no good. 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 when it comes,

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