But we don’t remember those lives. We can’t read our diaries.’ ‘It doesn’t matter. We are where we are, however we got here. What matters is where we go next.’ ‘But can we choose that?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘We’re Dead. Can we really choose anything?’ ‘Maybe. If we want to bad enough.

The world that birthed that story is long gone, all its people are dead, but it continues to touch the present and future because someone cared enough about that world to keep it. To put it in words. To remember it.

She gathers my half of the blankets around her and curls up against the wall. She will sleep for hours more, dreaming endless landscapes and novas of colour both gorgeous and frightening. If I stayed she would wake up and describe them to me. All the mad plot twists and surrealist imagery, so vivid to her while so meaningless to me. There was a time when I treasured listening to her, when I found the commotion in her soul bitter-sweet and lovely, but I can no longer bear it.

That's why we have memory. And the opposite of memory— hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can built off our pasts and make future.

We eat and sleep and shuffle through the fog, walking a marathon with no finish line, no medals, no cheering.

It’s sad to see them staring wistfully through the window when the door isn’t locked.

Once again the absurdity of my inner thoughts overwhelms me, and I want to crawl out of my skin, escape my ugly, awkward flesh and be a skeleton, naked and anonymous.