Everyone leaves a trail of their disintegration. Move through time and watch the marks you leave: photographs, cologne whiffs hovering over an empty sidewalk, notes tucked in bicycle spokes, wet footprints in foyers. Flakes of breakfast pastry, stray hairs, eye gunk wiped away, dead cells, dandruff—you are always leaving something behind. Some microns of matter are hard, others very soft. Our bodies slough apart as navel lint, follicular meringue, dried spittle crystals. We leave these crumbs just in case we ever get the chance to return. But we never do. There is no retracing. Everyone falls to pieces eventually. Melancholy is just that experience of backward-looking. Even the most focused, striving prognosticator can’t see what will happen next. We back into what’s coming, no matter how hard we crane our necks. Aging is our only means of time travel. Winds blow us into the future, and all we leave behind is a collection of decaying mementos.

Be here now, looking back, backing forward, Alfonzo hummed to himself.

Intermittent gusts carried away every other word of the conversations Alfonzo and Vivi tried to have. Were they murmuring to one another or to themselves? Each blink dissolved the positions of objects in relation to one another. Birds hung suspended in the static pressure of competing gusts. Clouds blew between them and the sun.

Vivi gestured to a wooden boat pulled up on the beach. They sat down in its shelter, facing the sea. The gray-green-black waves kept coming and going, never tiring. The waves came. The waves went. Alfonzo imagined all the fish out there and wondered at their shapes, what they saw and heard.

The briny aquatic life odors mixed with decay: plant, animal, and mineral mingled.

Vivi turned to Alfonzo and began to hum a new story.