Exhalation

by Ted Chiang

He offered an explanation, speaking of his search for tiny pores in the skin of reality, like the holes that worms bore into wood,

“Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity,”

Though I am long dead as you read this, explorer, I offer to you a valediction. Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.

Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don’t need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community’s understanding of itself. So it wouldn’t be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.

Sex isn’t what makes a relationship real; the willingness to expend effort maintaining it is.