Rating: K

Genre: Drama

Theme: Immortality.

She sat there, without fail, every evening.

When the last traces of crimson had bled into navy blue and little lights stared coldly down, she would come. She, the girl with heart break in her smile, a million years in her eyes, and an infinite well of memories. Every night like clockwork she would come to sit on the dew-damp grass beneath the trees and stare up at the moon… Even when it wasn't there she'd map the memories of its path with her eyes, and simply smile distantly as she was engulfed.

I often wondered who she was.

-

I watched her, without fail, every evening.

Sometimes I caught her eye, her glittering, hallowed eyes that had overflowed with visions of torment and rapture until, at last, there was no room for anything more. She would sometimes flash me a vague smile before she turned back to the stars, but mostly she would pass right over me and stare at some unknown point where another had stood so many years before, and remember. It seemed to be all she ever did.

'My demons… Aren't true demons,' her eyes told me. They glittered in the darkness, focused on a seemingly insignificant point some inches left of my gaze.

'They were people, which means that they're worse than demons. They're real.'

She smiled sweetly, broken and lonely, and her eyes began to scream.

-

One evening, I wondered if she was truly alive. I wondered if perhaps I had invented her. The thought came to me so suddenly, I didn't know what to make of it, but the more I thought about it, the more I began to wonder.

I fervently hoped that she was real.

If she wasn't…

Then there was the chance that I wasn't, either; there was a chance that she invented me.

There was the chance that I was someone else entirely different to who I had built myself up to be, and then there was the horrifying chance that neither me mattered at all. My greatest demon was that I didn't matter, was that I would fade away and no one would notice. What if I was nothing more than a dream? How could anyone live, knowing that nothing they do will ever change anything or anyone? I had struggled all my life to write my story in a desperate attempt at immortality, because I knew the power of stories. With this knowledge also came the dreadful truth that for each story told, another billion are discarded or never told or, worst of all, forgotten… I shuddered, and I bowed low under the weight of my nightmare…

And she continued to drown behind her eyes, oblivious.

-

One evening I dared to approach her, two cups of coffee steaming in polystyrene cups.

I didn't really know what to say now that I was finally here. I awkwardly asked her if she was well, which was a stupid question, and one she rightly didn't dignify with an answer.

Of course she's not 'well'.

But, she drinks the coffee. She doesn't thank me, or even look at me.

I walked away that night triumphant.

-

The next night, I don't ask her whether she's 'well' or how she's been, or anything else that I would have asked had she been any other.

I ask her what she is.

For the first time she meets my gaze, and her eyes are fire and bloodied ice, glittering with long-dead stars. She tells me she's a memory…

Her voice echoes across time, her words losing all meaning as they boom through the ages, until there's only sound and sensation. I see her and see through her, see the world as she has, see through eyes as old as life. Together we see people and generations and millions and millions of years fade from between her fingers, scattering like the drifting snow upon the dark mark of the earth, and I have pause to catch my breath.

… and then she smiles, recollections welling behind her eyes and spilling unnoticed down her cheeks.

-

I often sit with her now.

I learn that her name is Saya, but when I ask her how old she is, she just gives me a smile brimming with memories and tells me: a lifetime.

It makes a strange sort of sense.

She doesn't ask about me, but I tell her anyway, and she listens, which is enough.

My name is Peter. I decided that because I couldn't write my own story, I would become a part of someone else's story, and would be content. My body is nineteen years old, but my mind is a thousand…

And that was the first and last time I ever heard her laugh.

-

One evening, I dared to kiss her, because she was lonely and because though she had shown me the horrors of immortality I still wanted to be more than a dream to someone, and she was so imperfect that she was beautiful.

For decades we lived and breathed like any other ignorant human, watching the world march by as we wasted our time away into nothing. And it was glorious.

-

I died.

My body was seventy-three years old, but my mind was a thousand. Nowhere near the lifetime that Saya's was, I admit, but more than long enough to be lonely.

When my breath stilled, she breathed for me. She stole me away, bundled my corpse into her mind, melted me into fire and bloodied ice and long-dead stars.

She continued to walk the world, though she had died a million years before.

And every evening until the heart beat of the earth itself stilled, the memories in her eyes mapped the path of the moon…

And she smiled.

- - -

Word Count: 957