By mid-morning I leave the ruins of the city behind, and by that afternoon, I enter a forest. It’s a relief, to get out of the too-bright sunlight that reflects off shards of shattered glass and twisted metal, to leave behind the broken streets, a silent, solemn graveyard of memories scattered like bones. The forest has its own pitfalls, but I find the close spaces and green twilight a comforting change.

Birds call from the branches, and from the bushes I can hear small rustlings. A memory flickers through my mind, flitting like the birds above me. I am a child, hiking along narrow trails with others. Wonderstruck by massive trees, captivated by long sticks and odd stones and tiny, unfamiliar flowers. Later, terrified that bears or wolves or nameless, faceless monsters will come for me as evening falls, I cling close to the adults. I store the memory away again, with all the others. I know there’s nothing that can harm me here.

Instead, I search my memories for any trace of this place, but find nothing. If it exists in my memories, it has changed beyond recognition. Trees have grown and fallen, streams changed their course, old paths overgrown and new ones traced. Even the land itself will change its shape with time. The forest might be entirely new: with no one cutting them anymore, trees have gradually been reclaiming the land. I walk through the beauty of an unknown wilderness, unhaunted by ghosts. Aside from those I carry with me, that is.

In the evening, a light rain begins to fall, droplets pattering on leaves, the ground, my head. I think of an old poem. It is one repeated many times in my memories, especially towards the end. “There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground…”

I am not a poet. There are no poets anymore, and never will be again. But I can remember. “Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, if mankind perished utterly…”

But I mind. Walking through an empty world with nine billion ghosts on my shoulders, I remember. I remember all that humanity was and could have been.

I am a living record of humanity’s greatest triumphs, and still greater mistakes. The discoveries, the creations, the deaths, the wars. But I prefer the other memories, the smaller ones, of holiday dinners and days at the beach and walking through the park holding hands. Of sunny smiles and moonlit kisses and off-key karaoke. Of a child, so tiny and fragile, held close and safe. I hope that somehow, some way, my records are found and deciphered one day, in some distant unimaginable future, by whoever or whatever follows us, from the earth or the stars. And I hope that whoever you are, you will remember humanity as I do: by the love, and not the destruction.

I don’t have a name. There’s no use for one in a world that contains only me. But you can call me Chronicler: last witness to the world that was, first to the world that will be.