The Everlasting

IT IS DIFFICULT to keep track of time when you are traveling through it. We dove and rose through the years like a needle through cloth, and the needle does not count the stitches.

But you began to mark the days, after a while—even in rags, on the run, you were a scholar—and you tell me it was nine years, all told.

Nine years, we ran. Nine years we stole, hour by hour and page by page, from the miser of history. Nine cowardly years; nine perfect years.

I know you want to write the whole of it, every detail, so that we’ll never forget again, but Owen, have mercy: Don’t make me remember too well. Don’t make me lose them again.