I wish I had an origin story for you. When I was four, I was bitten by a radioactive myth. - Neil Gaiman

I am old now, or at least, I am no longer young, and everything I see reminds me of something else I’ve seen, such that I see nothing for the first time. A bonny girl, her hair fiery red, reminds me only of another hundred such lasses, and their mothers, and what they were as they grew, and what they looked like when they died. It is the curse of age, that all things are reflections of other things.

"And did I pass?" The face of the old woman on my right was unreadable in the gathering dusk. On my left the younger woman said, "You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear."

We build the stories in our heads. We take words, and we give them power, and we look out through other eyes, and we see, and experience, what others see. I wonder, Are fictions safe places? And then I ask myself, Should they be safe places?