February 2064.

It was raining in the morning when she awoke and still raining in the early afternoon when she went into town to grab something to eat. What lingered of the sun wobbled in the dim sky and the black shape of the mountains stood at the rim of the world like relics from a bygone era raised only in the storm. Outside the grocery store a boy no older than twelve or thirteen asked if she had seen a dog anywhere and she told him no and he went on. Somewhere down the avenue she heard a car horn blaring. She bought fresh vegetables and tinned soup and chicken and a pack of water bottles and paid and stood outside under the shelter of the bike rack waiting for the rain to subside but it looked like it would not.

The boy came back without his dog not ten minutes later. She thought about calling out to him but he just stood there opposite looking like a pilgrim washed up on the shores of the day, pale and soaked to the bone without a coat, and then he was gone again. Of the passing cars none stopped or recognised her and in the rain the headlights cut shapes across the scattered downfall like silhouettes. She stood there listening to it beat out inordinate over the roof for a long time. As if deciding what to do. But sometimes the simplest of solutions never appear because in some way their simplicity allows them to be overlooked and so she sat there, face turned up in the rain, waiting for nothing.

After a while she made her way back along the street and up the avenue. An old woman selling rhubarb and turnips out of a streetcart offered her some and she politely turned her away and continued on, bearing the rain against her matted hair and shivering. She passed again a number of people some of whom she recognised but she greeted none of them and at the bar at the top of the block she wiped her feet on the welcome mat and sat at the counter and ordered a whiskey straight and set her bag down between her feet. She looked like something excavated from a bog. Sodden in her jacket, light makeup running. Her hair in her face. The bartender poured her whiskey and passed it across the counter and she took out her purse and placed a handful of bills on the counter. He said it didn’t cost that much and she told him to pour her two more and after a moment he moved away and did so.

She drank her whiskeys and listened to the rain. By the window two old men sat smoking old cigars and talking amongst themselves and she listened to that too. There was a slot machine in the far corner of the room and every so often it made a small hum of noise as if the machinery had been rewound or restarted and flash and glare and then die away again. She listened to this, listened to the men. Soon they were gone and it was empty save her and a couple others at the far end under the low and solitary light and it smelled no more of smoke or of anything. Just the rain. She finished all the whiskey and called the bartender over. He looked at her not unlike the way in which someone looks upon an orphan, harbouring something akin to pity or distant worry. He asked if her she was okay and she said yes and ordered a shot and drank it and paid again and left.

It was still raining though not as heavily as it had been in the morning. She was very cold and her clothes clung to her so that when she bent her knees or raised her arms they peeled away like ice breaking and if she could ever get sick she was sure this would have been one of the times. In that afternoon sun the distant outline of the mountains stood stark black and very still and there was a slight wind silent in the dismal hum of traffic. The boy outside the grocery store had disappeared when she came back. She stood a moment by the bike rack sorting out her belongings and then she went on through town and back up the hill home.

At the end of the garden she stopped by the gate and peered in. She could not see Irene from there and the curtains were still drawn against the pale blue light of the waning evening. She stood there in the darker shape of the road like a wandering spirit, caught between one space and another eternally, wondering what to do. Whether to continue or not. Then she turned and headed down towards the beach. The tide was low and the sand still dry and the caves smelled of moss and sea salt and dust. She sat on a rock by the entrance and set the grocery bag in the sand and bent holding her face in her hands as if she were about to be violently sick. It hurts, she said. Jesus, it hurts so bad.

She was still there when the first of the sun fell below the bottom of the sky. What remained of the day was pale as snow and wet and the light reflected on the face of the water looked like glass and the sun sat at the cusp of the world like a small blue polyp, faintly quaking, so that in its immediacy all appeared as if fashioned out of something stark and very white, like a world moulded entirely from rocksalt. Seulgi wandered the caves as far as she dared go. Thirty years and still those walls remained a mystery to her. Places forever changing. Bones of old civilisations, lost in the ages. Once powerful tribes stencilling their histories into the rocks, each holding its own unsalvageable mystery. Each bearing the annals of its own and all separate and bearing no mark or gene of the other, all of man distinct in those images. Or what remained of them. Those rocks that served as a reminder to each new peoples of those preceding, of their dynasties, their delineations, their falls, so that each held in it something much more powerful, something unique, a sort of untapestried mythos of the world. For the workings of man can be erased by man but not his blood, or his troubles, his exertions. Not his progress or his legacies. Those things that exist solely in the hearts of men can never be destroyed because there lives something in each man unlike any other and it is his mind, his memory. No man nor creature nor event can wash away the spoken histories of other men. Only time holds that supreme power. Only time remains at the end of each path. Time the eternal victor.

She came up out of the caves against the white finality of the sun like a somnambulant raised out of some terrible slumber and there in the space between the outer world and the darkness within she stood making no attempt to move at all. The only sound the wind made was in the shaking of her clothes. She was still wet, still bitterly cold. If someone would have touched her no doubt they would have thought her immediately unwell but that itself was a useless notion. She stood wincing into the sun. It had stopped raining sometime earlier. The waves had risen up over the beach and there they lapped softly at the sand as if in waiting, or yearning. Briefly she thought about waiting until the tide was in. She thought about waiting until the caves were running with water and she was drowned under them and dead but what use was that? Nothing that she hadn’t tried before. Nothing to ever work.

She took up her bag and went home. A numbness in her chest and not with the cold. Some paranormal equinox of disorder lodged in the cavities of her heart. As if caught in some timeless tempest. Irene was sat watching TV in the livingroom when she came in. She smiled a tired smile at Seulgi and Seulgi back at her. ‘Where’ve you been?’ Irene said. Her voice was thin and breathy. As if she were struggling for it.

‘Just out for a walk,’ said Seulgi.

‘What did you get?’

‘A couple things.’

She went and emptied the bag out and put the vegetables away and poured herself a glass of water and came and sat beside Irene. ‘You look tired,’ she said.

Irene smiled. ‘A little.’

‘How’ve you been?’

‘Not too bad. Just a bit cold.’

‘It’s been raining all day. Just stopped.’

‘I can tell. You’re still wet.’

‘Sorry.’

She stood and excused herself. ‘Just going to get changed,’ she said.

‘Alright.’

She went upstairs and into the bedroom. The bedroom they had shared for longer than she could remember. Than either could. Downstairs faintly she could hear conversations on the TV, a laugh track, something else. She closed the door and sat on the edge of bed for a moment just thinking. As if wondering what to do next. She was still very cold and wet and her shirt stuck to her like dead skin. She thought of Irene for a while. She thought of how many times she had come in to see Irene there on the couch or in the livingroom or sat at the table and how different she had looked over the years, like a collage of these memories one after another, like pages in a children’s flipbook. How her face changed ever so slightly in each image. As if this picture of her were being drawn in old charcoal, slowly greying. Slowly withering. Fading. She thought of the first time she’d seen Irene sitting in there some thirty or forty years ago. She thought of Irene sitting there ten years ago. It was a light summer’s day or perhaps in August and she looked almost ethereal and very young. Then she thought of Irene sitting there now, just downstairs, just out of reach in the present. Finally she imagined coming back from town one day ten years from now and taking off her shoes and shaking the rain from her umbrella and climbing the stairs and entering the living room to find it empty and soon she was crying.

*  *  *

She stood at the counter dicing carrots with the serrated edge of the blade and using her finger to clean them off the side of the knife and onto the choppingboard. When she was finished she tipped it all into the big pot on the stove and stirred it through the gravy with the salt and pepper and then she took an onion from the fridge and began cutting into it. She didn’t even realise she was crying.

‘Seulgi,’ said Irene. She was sat at the table with her hands folded neatly in her lap, patient, calm. There was no sound save the spit of the stew on the old gas flame. ‘Seulgi. What’s wrong?’

She tried to turn and shy herself away. As if she could hide herself from Irene. As if in the act of doing so Irene would forget about it. She tried steadying the knife but in her shaking grip it was impossible. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘God, I’m sorry.’

‘Seulgi.’

‘I’m really sorry.’

‘Don’t be. Don’t be. It’s alright. What’s wrong?’

Irene stood and pushed her chair under and went over. She looked almost pitiable in her age, each movement slow and mechanical and laboured. Small and leptosomic as she was. And Seulgi there at the counter trying in vain to wipe her eyes and the snot bubbling under her nose, weeping like a child, lost and lonely and so very afraid. ‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Hey. Hey. What’s the matter? What’s gotten into you?’

She drew Seulgi in for a hug and felt her there against her own frail frame dangerously limp, like something lacking her own will entirely. She was just there. Boneless and fragile and appallingly vulnerable. So unlike herself. So much pain in that timeless visage of stoicism. So much to hide from the world.

‘Hey,’ Irene said. ‘Hey. Come on.’

And all Seulgi could say for a long time was, ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

*  *  *
 

Whatever outcomes lay ahead of her she knew in her heart like nothing else that there was no recourse for the pain she felt and never would there be. She had spent most of her life evaluating the nature of herself. Of what she stood for. What her existence itself meant for the cosmic order of the things. As if her being was something fathomed out of a dream, or as if perhaps that might be better. Maybe there were others like her. She thought the chance of that was almost too small to acknowledge.

In all her time she had never really sat and wondered whether it was worth it. Whether there lay any benefits to her immortality at all. There had been times where she’d sat and thought for a while and on every occasion the answer had been the same. It had been a great mystery. Something she didn’t know, something she thought she never would. For there are some things unanswerable in the grand scheme of the universe and her own fate perhaps solely amongst them. But now she knew the truth and she knew how different it was.

The truth wasn’t that she had the entire universe in front of her. That she held every day, month, year, in the palm of her hand, forever. An infinite amount of time to do everything she wished to do. Time and time, and nothing else. That she could live a thousand lifetimes and meet a million people and befriend each and every one of them. That perhaps one day she could start civilisations, or religions, or tear down nations and empires, or find the cure to diseases known about only in passing, or diseases not even discovered yet, or the secret to travel across the galaxy, or beyond, somewhere out there amongst the stars, that she could help man find a home there in the vast cosmos of space. That she held the key to all secrets of the universe forever, because that was what she was. What she always be. She would be forever.

The truth was that none of it mattered. That the very concept of an infinite existence was by at its rawest and basest core flawed, because it held to it one thing very real that was impossible to think about, that she could never come to terms with. The truth was that she had the whole universe in front of her, all of time itself, all of everything to ever be, and it didn’t matter at all. Because nothing would ever compare to Irene. And there was nothing that could ever dampen the feeling of being without her. Nothing and no one. She knew that with a certainty that was almost disturbing. It was like a scar. Like a deep cut. With time it heals. The skin closes up and the wound fixes itself and the body regenerates. The pain goes away. But the scar is always there. It always remains. A sort of warning. A retelling of the past. That remains when everything else is gone. She would find others. She had all of time to find others. But none would ever be Irene. None would be her Irene. And with each passing day she could feel it growing closer and each day the pain grew worse until at last each night she spent outside in the cold, when Irene was already asleep, wondering how bad it could become. How bad the agony could ever be. How much of it she could endure.

She sat there on the beach crying at the sky and cursing the nameless void of the world and pleading for a response but none came. Please. Please help me. Do something. I’m losing her and I can’t bear it. I can’t do it anymore. Please just let me die. Let me have that. If nothing else let me have that.