Chapter 20
I have always measured time quite unlike anybody else I know.
Elise’s life and her death have been my reference points for as long as I can remember. I know I do it, this strange, perverse measuring; my friends, at least the ones who know, have told me I do it. No matter what the event, it has always been in the context of that fateful day.
I finished school five years after Elise died. It was a few years after Elise died when I went to university. I got married sixteen years after Elise died. It was as if there had never been any other yardstick with which to chart the course of a life.
I grew up in a few weeks, crossing the neat, safe boundary of childhood into adulthood. There was no gradual process, no gentle sliding into an older, worldlier place, no preparation. Sharp
