A sci-fi vision of love from a 318-year-old hologram | Monica Byrne

171,437 views ・ 2016-05-31

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:17
Do I look real to you?
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Hope so.
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I have no idea if you're seeing this,
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but I'm just going to look ahead and trust that you're there.
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I've drawn a semicircle in the sand in front of me
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so I don't walk past it and look like I'm floating in midair.
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Right now I'm standing
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in the open air,
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on a beach under a palm tree,
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in the exact spot where your stage used to be.
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I have 12 minutes with you.
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I set a limit.
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My wife Navid once said
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that infinite possibility is a creator's worst enemy.
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For example, this dress: I'd asked her to design something
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that a priest might have worn in 23rd-century Cairo.
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But we only had three days to make it,
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and the only fabric we had
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was an old duvet cover that another resident left behind.
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But she did it, and it's perfect.
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And she looked at it and said,
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"Proof of concept -- creation needs constraint."
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So with these 12 minutes,
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I'm going to tell you about my greatest discovery.
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For my whole life, my obsession has been eternal life,
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as I know it is so many of yours.
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You may be happy to know that your research will pay off.
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I am 318 years old.
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The average human lifespan is now 432 years,
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and my work has been to extend the human lifespan indefinitely.
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And I've never questioned that someday,
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we'll reach a point where we'll be content.
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But the opposite keeps happening:
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the longer we live, the longer we want to live,
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the less we want to die.
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Who can blame us?
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The universe is so big.
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There won't ever not be more to see.
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Just yesterday,
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I was reading about how you can take out a boat on Europa
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and sail from island to island all over the planet,
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and some of the islands have villages that you can stay and visit
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and sleep under the shadow of Jupiter.
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And then there's this other island where there's just one songwriter
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who sits and plays mandolin for the ocean.
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And then there are others where there's no one
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and there never has been,
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and so you go just for the pleasure of touching your foot to sand
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that no foot has ever touched before.
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You could spend 400 years doing just that.
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Right now the Moon is rising in the Northeast.
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I can see the cities on it with my naked eye.
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They're connected like nerve clusters:
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Mariapolis on the South Pole, and Ramachandran on the Equator.
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And New Tehran in the Sea of Tranquility.
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That's where Navid and I met.
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We were both artists downtown.
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The day we met, we were passing each other in Azadi Square,
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and we bumped shoulders.
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And I turned to apologize
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and she, without saying hello or introducing herself or anything,
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said, "Well, why do you think we didn't just pass through each other?"
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And first of all, I thought, "Who the hell are you?"
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But second, the question annoyed me,
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because the answer is so simple.
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I said, "We didn't pass through each other
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because elementary particles have mass
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and because the space between elementary particles
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is filled with the binding energy that also has the properties of mass,
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and we've known that for 800 years."
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She must have been in one of those moods
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where she likes to mess with strangers.
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Or maybe she was just flirting with me,
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because she looked at me and said, "I thought you'd say that.
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Think deeper."
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And then she took off her belt,
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this belt that I'm wearing now,
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and she said,
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"Our universe is built so that particles have mass.
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Without that basic constraint,
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we'd have just passed right through each other at the speed of light
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and never even known."
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And that's how our romance began.
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Navid and I
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never ran out of things to talk about.
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Never.
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It was incredible.
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It was like we were both heroes climbing up into a mountain range together
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and we kept arriving at new vistas,
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and these new, perfect constellations of words
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would come out of us to describe them.
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And we'd forget them as soon as we made them,
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and throw them over our shoulder and go on to the next thing, on and up.
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Or one time, Navid said that our talk was like we were always making bread,
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and that we were always adding in a little more flour
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and a little more water,
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and folding it in and turning it over
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and never getting around to baking it.
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If my obsession was eternal life, Navid's obsession was touch.
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She had a genius for it.
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All of her work revolved around it.
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My body was like a canvas for her,
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and she would draw her fingertip down over my face so slowly
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that I couldn't feel it moving.
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And she was obsessed with the exact moment
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when I would stop being able to tell the difference between her body and mine.
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Or she would just lie across me and dig her shoulder into mine
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and say, "Pilar, why does this feel so good?"
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I'd say, "I don't know!"
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And she always had a facetious answer for her facetious question,
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but the answer I remember today is,
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"It feels good
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because the universe chose its constraints,
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and we are its art."
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It's always funny what you think the future is going to be like
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versus what it turns out to be.
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In your time, scientists thought humans could freeze themselves
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and wake up in the future.
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And they did -- but then they died.
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In your time, scientists thought humans could replace organs
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and extend life for hundreds of years.
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And they did,
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but eventually, they died anyway.
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In your time, Earth is the only place people live.
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In my time, Earth is the place people come to die.
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So when Navid started to show the signs,
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our friends assumed I would do what everyone does,
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which is say goodbye and send her to Earth,
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so that none of us would have to look at her
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or be around her or think about her and her ...
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failure to keep living.
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More than anything,
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they didn't want to be around her actual physical body.
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They kept referring to it as "declining,"
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even though she herself was fascinated by it,
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the changes it was going through,
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following the rules of its nature day by day, independent of her will.
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I did send Navid to Earth.
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But I came with her.
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I remember a friend of ours, just before we left, said,
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"I just think it's arrogant,
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like the rules don't apply to you, like you think your love is that special."
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But I did.
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So, even here on Earth,
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I kept working on how to extend life.
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It didn't occur to me
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that there could be any other response.
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I kept going back to that thing that Navid said to me
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that day in Azadi Square,
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that without that basic constraint --
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a universe that granted mass to matter --
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we would not exist.
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That's one rule.
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Another rule is that all mass is subject to entropy.
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And there is no way to be in this universe without mass.
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I know. I tried everything.
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I tried creating a photon box where the Higgs field was altered.
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I tried recording all subatomic movements in my body
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and replaying them on closed loop.
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Nothing worked.
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But my final innovation was to create a coil dimension
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with the boundaries of a body in which time moved infinitely slower,
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but whose projection would appear to move in normal time.
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That body would then appear in our universe as a hologram --
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here but not here.
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When I realized I'd done it,
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I ran to her room,
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so happy to tell her I'd done it,
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moving through space almost normally to all eyes,
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even to my own,
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and went to lie down next to her,
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and forgot, and fell right through her.
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I'd found a way to eternal life,
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at the expense of the one thing Navid loved most,
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which was to touch and be touched.
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And she threw me out.
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I still got to watch, though.
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Humans live 400 years now,
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and we still die.
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And when death comes,
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the dying still pick at their bedsheets,
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and their arms break out in blue and violet blooms on the insides,
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and their breaths get further and further apart,
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like they're falling asleep.
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I've always thought that
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what gives a life meaning is adventure.
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And death is just a problem
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we haven't discovered the solution to yet.
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But maybe a life has meaning only because it ends.
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Maybe that's the paradox:
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constraints don't constrain, they allow perfect freedom.
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(Sighs)
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There was a thunderstorm here this morning.
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There is another forecast for tonight,
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but for now the sky is clear.
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I can't feel the wind here,
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but I just asked one of the caretakers who passed by what it felt like,
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and she said it felt warm, like melted butter.
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An answer worthy of my wife.
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I have to find my way back to the flesh.
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Until then, I take up no space but the space you give me.
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