It still amazes me how each person in the world subconsciously adapts every action to him or herself. They make their movements their own; the way they bend over to pick up a lone penny, the way they order strawberry frozen yogurt at the local dairy bar down the street. No one licks their lips the same way or offers the same smile or breathes the air during a sunrise in the same manner as anyone else. There are six billion of us and we still figure out how to be our own persons, how to wander away from the pressures to become a replica. It is impossible to successfully become anyone but ourselves, and yet we never notice the beauty of it. How Mom wrapped the banana with tin foil, how she strapped the box down, how she kneeled to the space beneath the bed and slid it underneath, like a bartender serving a regular customer a beer. I could never do that. This morning I peeled an orange and watched how my fingers dug into the skin, how the tips penetrated the abyss, how the muscles flexed and enlarged, fruit’s barriers breaking, juice squirting out of its tiny gash…like the way blood spurts from the dying man in old, low-budget movies…how juice flew onto my lips in tiny droplets of rain and how I closed my eyes and let my tongue slide…down…taking it in…how my teeth scraped their cushioned barriers as my mouth closed, restraining the hunger, the craving that multiplied in intensity as I opened the gates and ripped away the rest of the peel ravenously, savagely, in order to savor the virgin fruit inside. No one will ever eat an orange exactly the same way as I just did. Never again. My name is Meredith Gray. This is my story. It is not a story about my life. It is a story about my death. It is a mathematical proof that each memory, no matter how beautiful, how positive or negative, will one day add up to nothing. One big hit, a zero, an empty set, as one may say. The only thing that will matter in this world is not how great a time you experienced, but how great an earth you left behind. Remainders, baby. When your fifth grade math teacher told you that dividing a number by zero was an undefined term, that teacher forgot that the world is full of undefined terms. For millennia man has tried to define himself, and has gotten nowhere. You’d think the true meaning of life is to discover the true meaning of life. But someday the world will be over and everyone will have to cash in their chips…you divide your dividend, also known as squat, by your divisor and you get numbers. Numbers that transfer to good deeds, to changes in the clockwork of the earth. That number, that remainder, is all that is left of us. No wonder I’ve been so obsessed with math. It’s almost philosophical.