PROLOGUE
It’s New Year’s Eve, a quarter to twelve. Young people in the street are cheering, setting off fireworks and toasting with Michelob and White Claw. Once I’d have been out there with them. Tonight I am in bed with my cat, and my one nod to 2026 was changing my wall calendar.
I don’t want a new year; I want the old years back.
Oscar Wilde once wrote, “The tragedy of old age is not that one is old but that one is young.” When I first read those words, I didn’t understand what they meant, but now I understand them all too well. The eager, curious spirit still exists—trapped in a failing body and the wrong time.
The future, once so vast that any dream had time to come true, is a small black dot, but the past is all around me, forming a vivid, compact web of events. Memory lapses come more often now, but there is one period in my life when every memory is startlingly clear. I remember every name, every conversation, the food I ate, the clothes I wore, the music I heard as if it all happened yesterday. Perhaps that is because of the turbulence of my emotions at the time, or maybe some things are just unforgettable. This is the story I don’t want time to erase.
