One day, at about 6:07 Eastern Standard Time, everybody forgot everything.
         No one noticed at first, but all the borders were gone. There would have been a sense of freedom, of openness! if it wasn’t for all the panic and terror.
         Eventually people started looking at maps, but they didn’t understand them. A sense of division they could understand (a sense of division was one of the first things rediscovered), but no one could quite work out what in the past had been divided. And anyway, who cared? There were other more important things to work out first. Peers required food and shelter, and protection from all the frightening things they no longer understood. Leaders emerged, leaders died. Collectives emerged, and died. It was never everyone for themself, but eventually there grew to be a sense that it wasn’t all for one and one for all either, despite the inspiring quotation someone had discovered somewhere and which was now, some years after the forgetting, fading from graffitied walls from Bogotá to Timbuktu.
         Microborders emerged, then macroborders. Borders expanded and contracted as their inhabitants renegotiated with their neighbors, with cleverness and blood.
         It’s not our business here to chart the long-term pulse and flow of groups and tribes and states of identity. But when a young woman, whose name had been Sarah, but who never knew that, found herself in a house, on a street, near a farm, near a wilderness, near a number of neighbors and animals, when Sarah (we’ll keep calling her that) began to develop the sense that this was not the house where she belonged, that these neighbors were not peers with her best interests at heart, that even many of the other inhabitants of this house, and who they were in relationship to her she did not know, were also not beings with her best interests at heart, when Sarah came to this conclusion, and it took some time, since conclusions were not easy to reach and were never based on reason alone but were also assembled from currents within the body and accumulating inclinations in the soul (although there was no word for soul yet), when Sarah came to this conclusion she took from the home what she felt was necessary, which included her two young children (what are children?), neither of them old enough to walk or talk and so largely unbothered by 6:07 EST, and set out across the wilderness because of this indescribable unease, and came eventually to an area with other neighbors, farms, animals, etc., and settled there among the new friendly people, without understanding that friendliness, and unfriendliness for that matter, were all things that had been forgotten as well and had had to be relearned in multiple and idiosyncratic ways, she lived there in happiness for some time before new borders emerged into life, like red ink spilling across an old map, or a line of fire on the horizon at night that means your crop is being burned to ash, and the new friendly people set upon her and her children (these are my children, she thought) in an excess of bewildered blame, bewildered on all sides really, and killed her and made her children into pack animals, no one could quite say where she had come from or where she had died except that in one place or another she was or was not welcome.
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