Josefina Vicens // "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 distance; we don’t see the effects of the passing years. I realize that my wife has aged only when I see old photographs. And not even then, because they were taken in surroundings so different from the present ones and in such ancient clothing that I look at them as if they weren’t of her… Her aging hands, her eyes surrounded wrinkles, and her grey hair don’t surprise or displease me or make me remember the smoothness of her skin and her black hair of a former time. 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."