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Neither Augustus Waters, nor I, spoke again until Patrick said, “Augustus, perhaps you’d like to share your fears with the group?”

“My fears?”

“Yes.”

“I fear oblivion,” he said, without a moment’s pause. “I fear it like the proverbial blind man who’s afraid of the dark.”

“Too soon!” Isaac said, cracking a smile.

“Oh, was that insensitive?” Augustus asked. “I’m sorry, I can be really blind to other people’s feelings.”

Isaac was laughing, but Patrick raised a chastening finger and said, “Augustus, please, let’s return to you and your struggles. You said you fear oblivion?”

“I did,” Augustus answered. Patrick seemed lost.

“Would, uh. Would anyone like to speak to that?”

I hadn’t been in proper schooling in three years. My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed. I was a fairly shy person; not the hand raising type. And yet, just this once, I decided to speak. I half-raised my hand and Patrick, his delight evident, immediately said “Hazel!”

I was, I’m sure he assumed, opening up. Becoming part of the group.

I looked over at Augustus Waters, who looked back at me. You could almost see through his eyes, they were so blue.

“There will come a time,” I said, “When all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything.”

“There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this,” I gestured encompassingly, “will have been for naught.”

“Maybe that time is coming soon or maybe its millions of years away. But even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”