We do not know when you are. We do not know what you still have — whether you are reading this with a body that aches and breathes and startles at unexpected sounds, or whether you are reading it in some other way we cannot imagine from 2126 AD. In either case, the fact that you opened this document at all suggests something in you was looking for something. We would like to believe that something is what this archive is about.

The entries in this archive are about the body. But they are really about the self — the specific, continuous, imperfect, unoptimized, sometimes painful, frequently embarrassing, occasionally transcendent self that the body made possible. The self that remembered things it would rather have forgotten. The self that felt things it did not choose to feel. The self that could be touched, and recognized in a mirror, and known by another person standing close enough to see the exact color of its eyes.

That self had a name. It had a history. It had a face that changed over time and carried the changes honestly. It was, by any objective measure, inefficient. It was also, by any honest measure, the only thing that ever truly existed.