“Now close this book and remake the world.”
I close my book.
I must remake.
How does one “remake?”
One starts by unmaking.

I unmake my book.
I unmake my room and my house and my street.
I unmake the world bit by bit.
I take every species and mineral and feeling.
I look at them closely and unmake their carefully woven parts.

Now I am left with the unmade.
Pages and stomachs and crystals and fur and support beams.
The word “Microsoft” and the connection between siblings and an unremarkable sunrise.
They float separate in nothingness.
I leave myself made so I can remake.

It’s like taking apart a ballpoint pen and putting it back together.
Only this time, I decide how it gets put back.
Most things I remake the same:
Organs in the body, ink printed on paper and skin, trees growing above their roots.
These all stay the same.

But there would be no point if I did not learn from my unmaking.
I learned that the word “bemused” is confusingly similar to “amused,” so I make them different.
I learned that there is no need for extra qualification of cousins.
They are all just cousins now.
I change many little things like those.

I do not change the ugliness.
It was there when I started, the shadow and the death and the violence.
It frightened me to look at, and I was glad to unmake it.
But it is important, and it is real, so I put it back.
It is what balances this whole worldly contraption, if correctly assembled.

I look over my remade world.
It has a remade room, and a remade house, and a remade street.
My book has been remade exactly as I remember it.
I replace my book upon its shelf.
I watch the remade people out the window, continuing their lives.

– First line from The Runaway Species by David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt