A Letter for Whoever Reads This Later

My grandmother, having done her work, would have stopped here. I am going to say one more thing, and then stop too.

I do not know when you are reading this.

If you are reading it close to when I am writing it, the pressures I have described will still feel abstract to you. You will recognise them, partly. You will doubt others. Some will feel true to your life, and some will feel like they are about a world next to yours, not your own.

If you are reading it in ten years, it will feel closer. You will have lived through more of what I was describing. Some of the specifics I did not name will have happened. You will know them by their names and their dates. I do not.

If you are reading it in fifty years, the world will be a world I cannot imagine. Much of what I have described will have happened, in one form or another. You will look back on this book the way we look back on earlier books that saw things coming — with a mixture of respect for what was seen and amusement at what was missed. That is fair. That is how time works.

If you are reading it in a hundred years, I do not know what to say to you. I do not know whether my grandchildren's grandchildren exist. I do not know whether my country does. I do not know what your life looks like. I hope you have people you love. I hope there are still grandmothers peeling potatoes, in whatever form grandmothers and potatoes take by then. I hope some of what was good in my time survived into yours.