My Memories of a Future Life

In medieval times there was a kind of torture where your hands were bound in soaking cloths. As they dried they squeezed your hands like little birds in a vice, an inescapable ache hammering in the bones. If I carried an umbrella for half an hour, that’s how it would feel.

It’s time for me to find out which Lear I’m going to be.

The future isn’t written yet. We all get a chance to fix our mistakes.

Some people get road rage. I get road inquisition. Not in an aggressive way; you don’t have to hare around at high speeds until they’re a nervous wreck.

If all the cells in your body are replaced once every seven years, those players must have been through seven or eight entire upgrades, each more attuned to music.

All those black cases, battered from years of going wherever their owners did, kneecapping people on the Tube, bumping up escalators, sliding around the back of a tour van. Timelessly shaped pieces of luggage that shared their owners’ travels like a sorcerer’s familiar.

It’s my – it’s not my gift. I wasn’t born gifted. It’s how I’ve cheated with the unsatisfactory clay I’m made from.

I’ve been like a tourist in a city I’ve always worn as casually as my own skin.

In the mirror I could see the clock. We had been here only ten minutes. How time drags when you’re a corpse. But I’m not good with things that need to be done slowly.

Now there was this room of white walls, sealed crates, thin sunlight.