The Year I Met You

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The season between autumn and spring, comprising in the Northern Hemisphere the coldest months of the year: December, January and February.

A period of inactivity or decay.

I was five years old when I learned that I was going to die.

It hadn’t occurred to me that I would not live for ever; why would it? The topic of my death hadn’t been mentioned in passing.

My knowledge of death was not tenuous; goldfish died, I’d learned that first-hand. They died if you didn’t feed them, and then they also died if you fed them too much. Dogs died when they ran in front of moving cars, mice died when they were tempted by chocolate HobNobs in the mousetrap in our cloakroom under the stairs, rabbits died when they escaped their hutches and fell prey to evil foxes. Discovering their deaths was not cause for any personal alarm; even as a five-year-old I knew that these were all furry animals who did foolish things, things that I had no intention of doing.

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