It is only in the body of a person whom we have loved deeply for a long time that we don’t perceive the passing of time, and that growing old with that person is a way of never growing old. Seeing someone from day to day has a slow, compassionate rhythm. The people who live at our side always exist in the most immediate time: yesterday, today, tomorrow; and we can’t see this shrunken distances; we don’t see the effects of the passing years. [...] The changes have occurred so slowly and are so intimately tied to my own that neither she nor I has been able to notice them. I think the great miracle of sharing your life is not perceiving the brutal destruction, the annihilation of the body that you love.

| Josefina Vicens, The Empty Book

The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died: when they reach old age, if they are not cut down and they manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb from overabundance. When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive crop of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death.

∆ When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamín Labatut