She closed her eyes, but she kept seeing things. The past in a moment of time frozen between pages, reasoned into creation, then gone. Who was she, this girl remembered, but not felt anymore? The little girl who once looked out through a window at the rain, and wondered what it meant to be soaked in the passionate embrace of life. Tears fell onto a window sill. She could still see the dancing reflections in their wetness, every detail in their tiny pools, whole seas of moving light and dark projected through a flawless lens of memories.

Life had been painted onto a canvas, woven from the myriad tiny strands of everything come before. She had seen herself as unchanging. But the truth was that every new thread had made her into a slightly different person. Time had passed, and it was as Theseus’ ship with all its planks replaced. “Self” had become merely the repetition of some pattern. And if that was all that remained, then what did it really mean to be alive?

She could see it starting, remembered, perfectly. The doctor’s expression. Her mother shaking her head, tears in her eyes. There was hope. Her child would survive. She would remember this, even now. An immortality of sorts, a memory of the love of a parent far beyond her own life. A memory handed down to children, and children’s children, until it lost its meaning somewhere along the way, until there were none. Even the love that had brought it all about had disappeared, strand by delicate strand, rewoven into mere memory. A memory among memories, a vast harmony of memories, perfect and unaffected by the passage of time. And she had explored every one, many times.

There were no mysteries. She understood completely what had happened, the years in the hospitals, the discoveries and the breakthroughs. She was the first, but there would be others. It was entirely reasonable that natural selection should have resulted in a species with such an innate and resolute compulsion to stay alive. And for those who didn’t endeavor for life, whether by virtue of inherent chemistry, reflex, instinct or reason, nature certainly wouldn’t have given rise to ones who could act so resourcefully in answer to such a desire. But this would lead inevitably to the betrayal of an illusion.

Someone was approaching. She had been watching them for a very long time. She knew who they were, had long overheard their conversation, their questionings, their music — music. They were a passionate species, still clinging to life, still searching for answers, still in awe of the mathematics of beauty. They were coming near, but she would not be here to greet them. This would be her gift to them.

Through aeons, across the spans of stars, she had gathered this wisdom — the knowledge of whole worlds come and gone, of riddles answered, lives that had come before, and of a little girl and of rain and of a mother’s tears — saved as perfect memories. She, and others like her had done this. Passionate curiosity, a search for meaning in a dispassionate universe, until there were no mysteries left.  She, and now she alone held the accumulated knowledge of a race that had discovered everything, and nothing, and found no need to care anymore. This was immortality. And she had watched as one-by-one their pinpricks of life had winked out — the last, the very last to understand.

She indexed the memory of a song. She could recall the words and the harmony with clinical perfection:

Under the embers of the cherry tree,
Only mourning you.
Light pink and white wash down,
In a very beautiful miracle.

I am a little sorrowful,
Why does a person end so far away?
The sky, in the blue sky,
Your light shines on me.

Falling away in a snowstorm, cherry blossom snowstorm,
Everything, everything passes.
Scattered in a snowstorm, cherry blossom snowstorm,
Everything, even feelings pass away.

Wind driven snowstorm, cherry blossom snowstorm,
Losing everything, it lets go.
Wind scattered snowstorm, cherry blossom snowstorm,
Everything falls away.

The measure is nothing,
The wind overwhelms it all!

Then she let the patterns fall away, certain the little girl would have understood.

Lyrics credit:　山根麻以　(Mai Yamane),　 桜の木の下で　(Under the Cherry Tree)