I buy and sell memory. Well, "memories", to be more precise. My apologies for the clutter, but memory is like that, isn't it? — as you can see, things are bit jumbled at the moment. Let's see… in this box… well, see for yourself. Nice, wasn't it. The taste of freshly buttered corn at a family picnic. Someone's small memory of a happy event. Or this one — the first smell of autumn in the air; I think this one comes from New Hampshire. Oh, and you'll like this one… seagulls and waves and the slight chill of moonlight. Yes, it's very nice. Oh, and this: a phone number. It's a pity that I don't know what store it held for the rememberer, but you can tell, just by experiencing it, that there was a great deal of… ambivalence, perhaps? Some of them, they're a bit broken and in pieces, but I'm doing my best to put them back together. Memories are fragile things, you know, tending to easy breakage. So sometimes I have to improvise a bit, taking a bit from this and a bit from that and a bit from this one over there. It may not be 100% authentic when it leaves here, but it will still be enjoyable for the customer. But the best, of course, are the ones that arrive whole-cloth. This large box here, for example, is the night a young man proposed to his future wife; that's a memory full of all manner of things, looking backwards to the day they met and forwards to what he hopes their life will be like together. One of my richer items. Or this one: the first time a father held his newly adopted daughter — you can almost feel the fear and the pride in that one, cant you. Memories can be such tricky things. I no longer question their authenticity when they arrive in my warehouse, simply that they were someone's experience, shaded and honed and coloured by how the rememberer felt about the event or the person or the time of year. And I suppose that's what makes memory such a joy: this one, for example — she may never have actually loved the man, but she remembered she did. And yes, to a degree it is true: tell a lie about yourself long enough, and it will become an intractable memory. I have seen entire lives spun out on memories of events that never happened… … which is usually why they wind up here. Eventually, some folks cast off those memories of a past that never was. They are usually hugely detailed, vividly coloured, and intensely felt — which makes them, for me, an especially valuable commodity. Some of my customers will happily pay quite nicely for memories such as those, just as I am happy to sell them. No, I find nothing wrong with that. It is not for me to make such a moral judgment. If anything, it is my belief that memories are only good if they are shared. Otherwise, they simply remain... in a box, in a jumbled pile in a dusty room: memories that risk being largely forgotten.