I got the orientation email for my internship last week. I received it while I was sorting through my mum’s stuff. I had found several boxes of my baby things. It was overwhelming; my mum had kept everything, even my baby clothes, all folded up neatly, and the little wooden toys I learned the primary colors with. For normal people, childhoods take up almost a quarter of their life but, for me, after I’ve lived for however many centuries I’ll live for, my childhood will seem like a tiny dot on the horizon, a brief moment in which I was a part of society in a mostly normal way, experiencing changes in my body along with friends who were going through the exact same changes at the exact same time. I had always known that my growth would end at some point, that I’d stop changing once my body reached its peak, just as my mum told me it would—that then I’d be frozen as I was, timeless and un-aging, while my friends kept progressing toward death. And yet, I spent all my time as a child wanting to be an adult. Now, it’s the other way around. I felt a sense of yearning, looking through my baby things, like I wished I could do childhood again, and pay attention to every little change I experienced. I packed all of my baby clothes and toys into a bag to give to charity. The gallery had felt so far from my situation in that moment that I didn’t bother to read the email. Now, I get my phone out and scroll through my in-box.

The email is from the director of the gallery, a man called Gideon. It’s addressed to me but I can tell that it’s an email that is sent out to all interns as my name is in a slightly different font from the rest of the message. “It is a huge honor to welcome you into our project space,” the email begins. “Please report to the main reception on your first day and the receptionist will send someone down to meet you,” it continues, before closing off farther down with, “with deep gratitude.” It’s a nice email. But there’s nothing about how to get into the building itself, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone else around, no staff, no other interns. I look up the OTA on Google and click on the number that comes up—I realize as I do that it says, “Closed—Opens 12 p.m. Tuesday,” which is the day after tomorrow.

“Hello?” comes a voice on the other end of the line.

“Hi,” I say. “I’m an intern at the OTA and I’m trying to get in the building but there’s no one here.”

There’s a pause on the other end of the line. Then the voice says, “You’re . . . Lydia.”