Come closer. You might touch me, you might hear me breathe and speak your name. We leave condensation on the glass, our fingers tracing hearts where we want to be, asymptotes of cold and warm made material and wet. And I can smell you, campfire and sandalwood, camphor and musk, sweat beading on your brow. 

Every collection brings us closer. I begin to see you at the edge of form, standing over something still obscure. You brush away the sand, turn an object over, purse your lips and blow away what remains, a day we shared in an absent place, a field of voices echoing down a waterfall of silence. Then you stand, raise your hand to me, open and forgiving. 

We constellate like stars, antimatter proximate and hard as flesh. In a flash you’re gone, and I’m left to wait out time again, bound with all the others to display what we forgot. But your fingerprint remains, a whisper of your breath, the smear of your heart on the mirror. 

Coda 
We human animals bower-bird place and time in museum-nests, fold objects and ideation together into fine displays. Every object tells a story, and every story multiples through the interface where, time after time, people and objects meet. Every object constellates a halo of these human interactions, from the moment of fabrication by a human hand, to the people who collect and curate, to the visitors who move from room to room, hovering and observing. But while the human animal is central to the gathering, only traces of the human remain. We come and go, talking in our voices soft and low, our collections somehow uncollecting all we are.