The Museum of Human History

It was a great place to take a photograph but Luke could not take a photograph because he had no more film, so instead, he just blinked slowly and pretended his eyes were a camera shutter clicking closed.

She will think: We disappear so many times before we do, finally, disappear.

“Nobody asks to be born,” Tess said, staring at the enormous mammal, “or to be born again.” “There’s such loneliness in being the last of your kind,” Luke said.

Because when I look at you, sitting across from me, eating hot dogs, laughing at your own special brand of gallows humor, I see a sepia tone bleed into your face, bathing you, already, in a pool of nostalgia and time.

“Time is the indefinite progress of existence. It continues with and without us, but without us for much longer.”

Standing beside her, Kevin saw himself as if in a snapshot. A memento from a past that never was.

How, when you curate the past, you change it. The story you tell becomes the story that’s told and everything untold is lost. It’s better than having no story at all, he supposes.

Relearning it, since, surely, she had known it all once. And what was the evolutionary advantage of forgetting? There must have been one, but she could not imagine just now what it could be.

And finally and forever, thank you, Andrew, for making ten thousand meals that have nourished my soul and for making every day lighter and utterly full.