There is a bitter sweet alienation in the recognition and recollection of an old role of yours now being played by a new face. You never gave it up entirely, never relinquished it or said farewell, it just drifted out from under you, or you might have thought you were holding on to it, but with the cunning of time you failed to notice the change of tenor. Everyone around you is moving at the same speed and so you have the illusion of standing still. But that the roles are oddly constant, that detached feature of the outgrown world, old hopes that can still stab you with longing, float up out of the dark, is a sign that somehow the culture is intact, slowly transforming according to its own laws. It hangs in space like a sort of coral, an organism that consumes minds like plankton and builds itself out of them. But all of us are streaming through it, from one end to another, leaving the faintest traces of our passage behind.