How can a 17 year old like me, suddenly…
How can a 17 year old like me, suddenly be 81?
— from Time
In the book
You can't keep it, but you can spend it. And once you've lost it, you can never get it back." (Sample epigraph — or use your own; you put the whole truth into one stunned question in: how can a seventeen-year-old like me suddenly be eighty-one?) At the end of the last chapter I told you there is one gauge on the panel unlike all the others — one tank that, once it is spent, is gone for good, no matter how well you rest or how much you earn. […] Here is the strangest fact a person ever has to absorb: how can a seventeen-year-old suddenly find himself eighty-one? It does not feel like decades passed; it feels like a single afternoon that somehow ran long. And life does you no favor here — it does not pause to remind you that it is running out. — Time