《一》
She had lived a long time.
Alan had realized from a long time ago that she was no longer aging, and by Alan's words, aging was like a hot light that flickered and then disappeared completely from Alan's life.
The world seemed to bare history in her eyes. Not only the world, but perhaps Alan had seen many people whose naked lives were laid out in front of her like this, completely naked, like a match that had been struck, and Alan had watched it flare up, and watched it go out, repeating itself, monotonously, and cycling on and on.
In fact, Alan had a piece of amber that she couldn't figure out the age of, it was clear and hung around her neck all year round. Since she got this piece of amber, everything changed, and her life became about watching sundials run, gauging the trajectories of those galaxies, and maneuvering through important matters for the whole family.
There was always a place Alan would go to.
There was a crack there, and when Alan stood in front of it, the crack was always open to face Alan, and it was dark, deep, and bottomless.
Alan had a feeling like it was going to swallow her up. Falling was her natural destiny, perhaps everyone's. In a world of falling, without the ability to break away, people were imprisoned on the ground for the rest of their lives, through the end of their days.
Perhaps that wasn't so bad, Alan thought.
The creation and destruction of a planet magnified the snap of a finger infinitely; who could escape that snap? Alan wasn't sure she was that omission, only that her long life had turned her from this world into a watcher. Watching everything that quietly runs in the world, a vein, a micron, a stream of air, are what Alan cares about.
The contact, the birth, or the repulsion away was all so marvelous.
Even the things that didn't exist, Alan had a great urge to seek them out, her family knew nothing about it, no one knew what Alan was doing, only she knew. On the planet A751108, Alan was no longer surrounded by people from her same time period, they all disappeared into the past at the end of their lifespans, leaving only Alan behind, leaving her and her fading memories of even longer ago, and perhaps one day, she too would forget those people, forget those faces. Even with those records, however, the blurring of those in one's mind is enough to bury the past and cease to exist ......
