She smiled. “Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories. Good night, my dear Nao.

She sat back on her heels and nodded. The thought experiment she proposed was certainly odd, but her point was simple. Everything in the universe was constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows by if we are to wake up and truly live our lives. That’s what it means to be a time being, old Jiko told me, and then she snapped her crooked fingers again. And just like that, you die.

But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It's already then.

The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist ? It feels like it exists, but where is it ? And if it did exists, but doesn’t now, then where did it go ?

And if you decide not to read anymore, hey, no problem, because you're not the one I was waiting for anyway. But if you decide to read on, then guess what? You're my kind of time being and together we'll make magic!

I think that if we don't learn to inhabit other people's perspectives, then we're never going to understand why people do what they do.

The important thing was that we were being polite and not saying all the things that were making us unhappy, which was the only way we knew how to love each other.