"I wondered how often the future waits on the other side of the wall, knocking very quietly, too politely for us to hear, and I was filled with longing to reach back into my life and inform that unhappy girl: all around her was physical evidence proving her sorrows would end. I wanted to tell her that she would be saved, but not by an act of will: clever Gretel pretending she couldn't tell if the oven was hot and tricking the witch into showing her and shoving the witch in the oven. What would rescue her was time itself and, above all, its inexorability, the utter impossibility of anything ever staying the same."—"Hansel and Gretel", Francine Prose

I wake up thinking about this passage, despite a mind fuzzed over with the mold of sadness and regret. In the future another self will look back and want to tell this-me: these sorrows will pass.

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