Six hundred years after they left we still have their mail.

I still have their mail. That is what I meant to say.

Nothing else makes sense. Or makes no more sense than it did to them. Their cities were ruins when they lived in them. The advertisements were just as illegible: spoke of products no one has ever needed. They wrote “Justice” on their courthouses without understanding what it meant; inside they wore their suits, argued and bartered and forgot that they trafficked not in words and money.

“You’ll find more in the shapes of the trees and coastline,” she said a few days before she left. “There’s no one here any more.” It was not until much later that I understood what she meant by that.

…