it has been made into an "extended version" by looping a very short track over and over. abby picked me up from the train station and we are getting food from food trucks. she has to go to the hospital evenings and weekends for blood transfusions, and does not want to talk about it. she works at a pharmaceutical company testing blood samples for contaminants. the irony does not elude her. what she wants to try is putting honey in coffee. she is curious but does not want to risk ruining a cup of coffee. after that night i tried it and then she tried it. coffee with honey is not bad, it just makes the coffee remind me of tea. she is sliding down her chair in the hospital room and she is happy to see us. the virus went to her brain. things translated from one language to another and back end up sounding simpler than they did at first. i don't want to say, do you know my name. i want to know if she does but i don't want to know if she doesn't. there is basketball on the tv, does she know how to watch that now. i am dancing with her and the dance is to find something that she remembers. i am good at this dance from all my dancing with old people. there is a wedding that she remembers. there are stories i can tell that require no context to be good to listen to. as soon as i leave the room she will forget this ever happened. memory is not a requirement for being human. next time she is a body of meat sitting propped up with its eyes closed and mouth open. the body is very dark. it is breathing slowly and the breathing sounds like bubbles rattling through plastic. we are having a family reunion. the centerpiece of the family reunion is to listen to the silence after each rattle and wait to see if there will be another. the children are confused. after a while the mother of the body says a better way is to watch the heart rate monitor. she watches it even though the doctor says not to. the number has been going down but it is not zero. one of the machines makes a whirring sound every so often. our family reunion is taking place in a small factory. my aunts tell the body's mother that the girl dying is her fault. also that it is a shame, in economic terms. i have never seen my father cry before. i stand next to him and this will have to do. i take the body's meat hand in my meat hand. it feels so surprisingly hot. the body and brain are going a way that all our bodies are still afraid to go. there is honor in that. at home i lie down and when i get up again she is dead. that night i find her blog and it is titled, the end is very short. when i become older than her i see that one person becoming older than a person who was born first is not impossible, and will happen again. the disease was congenital but the parents did not have it. the little sister did. when it happened to her one year later she was told she was going someplace else and said, will sis be there. she was awake when i saw her, i took her very small hand and said see-you-later. we all went to lunch and she was dead before we got home. i like music that sounds like machines. my heartbeat is a very short track created with electricity. so is yours. it can only be looped for so long but it is ok, when it stops you will have memorized it. it will already be happening again. two bodies silent under the stars and breathing will happen again. the bodies have no names or rather their names are always changing. it doesn't matter. names changing is happening all the time and will happen again. the this that we are did not originate in us and will not end with us. this this is always moving from one thing to another. books will be written about us, movies made, without ever mentioning us or having anything to do with us. one body thinking about how this will happen again will happen again. i am listening to the cloud atlas sextet on youtube when i realize that