Yan’s Reviews > The Post-Office Girl > Status Update

“And during the new few days she slowly, carefully gets everything ready for the trip, without joy, without expectation, without interest, as though this were not her life but just more work and responsibility.”

“Breathe calmly, daydream quietly, do your work, water the flowers in the window, ask not, want not. No more asking for anything, nothing new, nothing exciting.”

“… for the first time she has a feeling: too late, toil has exhausted her youth, the war has taken it away.”

“Now would be the time to try, in some small way, to be young again…”

“Money dissolves while you’re sleeping, it flies away while you’re changing your shoes (coming apart, with wooden heels) to run to the market for a second time; you never stop moving, but you’re always too late.”

“She tries harder, this twenty-eight-year-old woman, to remember what it is to be happy, and with alarm she realizes that she no longer knows, that it’s like a foreign language she learned in childhood but has now forgotten, remembering only that she knew it once. When was the last time I was happy?”