Sharp like barbed wire...

Being forgotten, he thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered? What he needs are stories, because they are a way to preserve one's self. To be remembered. And to forget. Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books. Stories, he has found, are a way to live a thousand lives - or to find strength in a very long one.

Do you know how to live three hundred years? The same way you live one. A second at a time. And that is how you walk to the end of the world. That is how you live forever. Here is one day, and here is the next, and the next, and you take what you can, savor every stolen second, cling to every moment, until it's gone. And there in the dark, you will ask yourself if it was really worth it. Were the instants of joy worth the stretches of sorrow? Were the moments of beauty worth the year of pain? A life worth having is a life worth taking. Always.