Have I strung you along?
I’d hoped that in leaving behind my account of what we did and what happened to us on the Tennessee, that maybe two thousand centuries from now—or whenever—someone, you, might find this and say, There once were these things called humans, and this is what it meant to be one of them.
I realize I just called us “things.”
We are faulty machines with built-in obsolescence, and we can make more of us.
Cogs making cogs.
And maybe that’s the whole point, after all—that every one of us who ever existed spent all those limited days over the thousands of centuries we were here just trying to figure out what it meant to be us. The mousetrap trigger is this precise point: Pour the word “us” into the coding of a human, and we immediately discount as inferior or useless all the not-us things in the universe.
Are you one of us?
This is my jar. I’ll leave it here, atop this hill.
It is sad and wonderful.