A group of three teenagers is hiking up the hill. They get interrupted by a mesmerizing meteor shower.
One of the girls with red hair shouts excitedly, "Let's make a wish. Let's make a wish."
The other one with short black hair replies, "aren't you too old for that, Kylie?"
"Oh, shut up, Saoirse," says Kylie to Saoirse.
"Hey, hey guys, chill. Okay, let's all make a wish. Saoirse, be a good sport," says the third girl with the long black curly hair in a cheerful tone.
"You're the best, Abby," says Kylie as she hugs Abby tightly in excitement.
"All right, all right, let's do this thing and get over with it already," says Saorise.
Kylie and Abby close their eyes for the wish.
Saoirse says to them sarcastically, "Now we have to close our eyes too; that's just great."
Then she also closed her eyes, and all three girls made wishes.
After that, they all dozed off after tiring themselves out from chatting all night.
The years go by, and then the decades pass by without them even realizing that they all get their wishes, live pretty normally, and die of old age.
But for one of them, life wasn't over.
Her body died, but her consciousness didn't.
She finds herself at a crematorium. She sees her pale old body in a casket, surrounded by her family and friends.
Her corpse gets Reduced to its essentials as it gets burned to ashes.
After the cremation, all who came to the funeral went back to where they came from.
Consciousness also goes with her family. She sees her partner and family mourning her day by day. She sees her husband crying himself to sleep in the empty bed where they both used to sleep.
She sees her son and grandchildren getting sad as they notice the old man crying. And she is just there, unable to do anything.
Time goes by, and her partner dies of natural causes; her son moves on; and her grandchildren get married and have their own children to raise.
She sees one of her great-grandchildren commit suicide at the early age of a teenager. She sees her son and his wife die in a car accident.
The wheel of time turns, and a century goes by. Her family is larger than ever before, and yet she is still alone, just there.
After getting attached to them and seeing the loved ones die at the end, again and again, one after another, generation by generation. She couldn't take the sadness and despair anymore, so to save herself from constant sorrow, she decided to part ways with her family forever.
She embarks on a journey to places that she has solely encountered in books and movies before, wandering and exploring.
She has accepted her fate. She knew that she was just stuck in life. She could see the beautiful plains but never run in them; she could hear the drops of rain but never feel them on her skin; She could smell the food but never eat it; she felt tired, but the luxury of sleep was a pipedream for her now.
She knew that she was stuck in life in her sorry state. She had no answer or explanation for it.
It just was.
She was an echo that only she could hear.
As time passes, she observes the world becoming the utopia that everyone wanted, But it didn't take long for it to turn into the dystopia that everyone feared.
The world population dropped from billions to millions in a matter of a few years.
There were droughts followed by famines. The agony and pain of the world had made her conscious and emotionless.
But before long, the world rose again, and humanity learned from its mistake and grew at a faster rate than ever before.
In a few centuries, the world has become a Type 1 civilization from Type 0.
Now, Humanity is able to harness all the energy that the earth has to offer.
The technology was straight out of a Philip K. Dick novel; through advanced technology, humanity started to terraform planets like Mars and Venus in an attempt to be a Type II civilization.
The world was the wet dream of a 21st-century nerd.
But in reality, it was just the beginning of a long, never-ending nightmare as humanity made itself an interplanetary species. With that, they also divided themselves even more.
And that gave birth to an interplanetary war over the resources of space.
War lasted for millennia until humanity engulfed itself in its greed.
The war was over, and so was the era of humans.
Now the blip of humanity on the cosmic calendar has been realized.
After Myr, the sun exploded and perished, transforming the solar system into nothingness.
Though the solar system was no longer there, the consciousness of that girl still existed, drifting through space with nothing except her petty awareness. She was left in the emptiness with a feeling of melancholy.
Now all she could see was the darkness and awful horrors of space. Her memory of the world before the explosion was gone. And All that started to mess with her consciousness.
Her consciousness was going numb; she could not remember her own name, let alone her life before the death of the red star.
Every now and then, she gets a glimpse of her life in the past, but before she fully understands anything about that memory, it fades away.
She longs for a beautiful death... To lie on the soft brown earth with grasses waving over her head and listen to the cry before the silence... To have no yesterday and no tomorrow... To forget time... To forget life... To be at peace.
The wheel of time spins, the eons go by, and the Universe starts to 'shrink', decrease, and decay, reversing the Big Bang and destroying the Universe in a Big Crunch.
And that gave birth to another Big Bang.
The Bang illuminates the universe, waking the numb consciousness of the girl. The memories of her past start flashing one after another until they reach the beginning of her fulfilling life on earth.
BANG! In less than a second, the universe was destroyed and created. once again.
A girl with long black hair in her early twenties wakes up screaming. She looks around and sees a man sleeping beside her.
She stands up from the bed. She puts on her robe, goes to the bathroom, brushes her teeth, then goes to the kitchen and makes her espresso in a smiley earth-face mug.
She walks toward the balcony and opens the door. She sits on a chair and crosses her legs. She holds the cup with both hands as she relaxes in the chair.
"Maybe I don't wanna be for eternity." She whispers to herself as she stargazes.
