Work Text:
So this is who I am
And this is all I know
And I must choose to live
For all that I can give
The spark that makes the power grow
We don't say goodbye
We don't say goodbye
And I know what I've got to be
Immortality
I make my journey through eternity
I keep the memory of you and me inside
~Celine Dion, “Immortality”
Sophie is twelve years old, and she is in a museum. The rest of her class has gone ahead but she lingers, fighting the voices that war inside her head and the pounding headache they create. She sees a boy across the room and he glances at her and she looks into eyes the teal of tropical oceans.
He speaks to her, asks her questions about newspapers and dinosaurs that she somehow answers without stammering. She blurts something stupid, but he just smiles; a smile that belongs on a movie screen, she thinks. He tells her that it’s nice to meet her, and she blinks and he’s gone. Vanished into thin air, somehow.
Sophie moves on, catching up with the rest of her classmates, wincing as a group of kindergarten students tears past and bombards her brain with stinging needles of thoughts. She puts her earbuds back in and drowns out the world, and tells herself one more day. Just one more day. She can make it through one more day.
Outside the wildfires burn on, baffling scientists and firefighters alike. Sickly sweet smoke drifts through the air, and far away in a secret land filled with light and beauty, the worry grows stronger.
Black-cloaked figures skulk through the shadows, watching everything with hidden eyes and making plans. One more day, they whisper from the dark, rotting corners of the world. One more day of blind safety before everything comes crashing down.
Sophie doesn’t know any of this. She doesn’t know that her life changed forever the moment the boy left. She doesn’t know why she can read minds as easily as the pages of a book. She has no clue that the boy from the museum has resumed his hopeless search, scouring the world over for the girl who will save them all.
Nobody at all knows that Sophie was the one.
<><><><><>
Sophie is eighteen, and she is about to travel the world. Six years have passed since she met the boy in the museum, a boy she has disregarded and hardly remembers at all. Six years of college, of part-time jobs and long sleepless nights and saving every dollar, of being the odd one out wherever she went; the girl who graduated at twelve, finished college at sixteen, the one with the photographic memory and too-smart mind. She has become used to it by now, but the stares and whispers and snide comments still cut deep.
So she plans her escape. She hugs her parents and sister goodbye and boards a plane for unknown lands. She crisscrosses the world: London, Sydney, Shanghai, Madrid, Singapore. She climbs mountains in Europe, scuba dives in the Great Barrier Reef, explores Machu Picchu and the Sahara and old crumbling castles in Scotland. She loses herself in the world, and wishes to stay lost forever.
She especially likes places where they do not speak her language. There, she can immerse herself in a tide of Spanish and Mandarin and Italian and Portuguese, and although she can still hear their thoughts, they are nothing more than babble, mixed up in the torrent of noise and spoken words. It is as if she could never read minds at all when she is in those far off places.
She finds a job in Paris, at an old bookshop by the Seine. She gets an attic apartment with a view of the Eiffel Tower and fills it with her books and mementos of her travels. She spends her days working the counter in the shop, nights wandering the City of Lights, and evenings curled up in some forgotten, dusty corner of the bookshop with an old book that tells of how the world used to be, before white hot wildfires and girls who could read minds like others read street signs. She is happy there, at least for a while.
<><><><><>
Sophie is twenty-five when she gets the call from her sister. Mom is dead, Amy says, died from a heart condition we didn’t see until it was too late. We need you to come home. Sophie leaves behind her life in France and boards the plane for San Diego that very night.
She goes home to funerals and tears, ashes and air like burned sugar, sideways looks and old friends whose blank faces say I don’t remember you. She moves back into the house she grew up in and takes care of her dad, aged well into his sixties himself. She works nights as a journalist for a local newspaper, finally putting to use the degree she earned as a teenager. She tells herself she’s fine, she’s happy, and she almost believes it.
The voices are always there, and Sophie can’t hide from them. She covers her head in pillows when she goes to bed, but the whispers trickle through the fabric and into her brain. At work, they tell her exactly what her colleagues think of her. Know-it-all, they say, Smart alec. Thinks she’s too good for us, doesn’t she? Sophie ignores them, but try as she might, they won’t go away.
Try. Try becomes her new favorite word. She tries to ignore the thoughts of the people around her, but it never works. She tries to sleep at night, but she simply can’t. She tries to hide the tear tracks and purple bags under her eyes in the morning, but makeup can’t conceal everything. She tries so hard to pretend she’s happy, that she’s fine, that she can make it through the day, but deep down she knows that one day she’ll break, and then she’ll be unable to pretend any longer.
That day comes when her sister visits, three months after Sophie’s return to California. Amy takes one look at her, and demands to know what’s wrong. Sophie cracks, then finally shatters. She tells Amy about sleepless nights and exhausted days, about makeup and cheerful facades, and then finally, about the constant voices in her mind and the endless thoughts that she can’t unhear. She cries as she speaks, and the tears feel like a cleansing, like taking a breath of fresh air after being trapped in the airless dark.
Amy doesn’t speak when she finishes, and only wraps her arms around Sophie and hugs her tightly for a long, long time.
<><><><><>
Sophie is twenty-seven when she moves across the country to New York City to be near Amy. Their dad passed away only a year after their mom, and there is now nothing left in San Diego that Sophie would stay for. She moves into a brownstone in Brooklyn with Amy and Amy’s girlfriend, and never regrets it. She finds a job as an international reporter and spends her time traveling the globe, chasing the next story.
She spends a year in London, researching the history of its numerous ghost stories, before moving on to Antarctica to interview the scientists there. She visits, and revisits, the places she had gone years ago, and once again immerses herself in the local culture and languages.
And when she tires of traveling, she returns to New York, to Amy—the one person who knows and accepts the truth about her.
It is there in New York, on a warm summer day with the sound of traffic out the window and Amy cooking pasta and singing along with the radio, when Sophie laughs and laughs until she can’t breathe, that she finally realizes that she is happy, really and truly happy.
The thought comes suddenly to her, and leaves her in tears that she can’t explain and that trail down her face even as she laughs. Amy only looks at her and smiles, because she understands.
“Are you going to be okay?” she asks Sophie, and Sophie thinks for a moment.
“Yes.” she answers finally. “I am.”
<><><><><>
Sophie is fifty-two, and the entire world has turned on its head. She is at the doctor’s office when she finds out, at her annual checkup appointment. A medical miracle, the doctor calls it. Sophie doesn’t see it as a miracle, but only as one more thing that’s strange, different, and inhuman about her.
As always, she goes to Amy first. Her sister now lives almost an hour away from Sophie’s apartment in New York with her wife and children, but Sophie doesn’t care about the longer drive. She needs to talk to her sister.
“The doctor says that I’m not aging,” she tells Amy. “I haven’t been for a long time, probably since I was in my mid twenties.” They cry together when they realize what this most likely means.
Sophie leaves New York the very next day. “I will love you forever,” she tells Amy before she leaves. “But I can’t stay here, knowing this.” Amy doesn’t want her to leave, but Sophie is determined to go.
She goes to Paris, to the same attic apartment she occupied so many years ago. She stays there for a long time.
She doesn’t call it hiding, but that’s exactly what it is. She’s hiding from the world yet again, hiding from her family, hiding from having her heart broken over and over when they are gone and she is not.
She reads her books and she writes her stories, and she avoids everything and everyone. She becomes used to being mistaken for a much younger woman, and she endures the phone calls from Amy, begging her to come home. Sophie says over and over that it’s better that way, but deep down she isn’t sure that it is.
Carpe diem, her innermost self whispers. Seize the day. You should enjoy the time you still have with Amy, not be hiding out here.
Sophie doesn’t listen, though, not until it’s too late.
<><><><><>
Sophie is sixty, and it’s far too late. The call comes around midnight, from one of Amy’s daughters. Amy died around an hour ago, she says, from the same heart condition that took their mother. The daughter says that her last words were, Tell Sophie that I’ll love her forever.
Her first emotion is shock, an almost lack of emotion. Too late, her brain whispers. Too late. Too late. Too late.
The second emotion is denial. She picks up her phone, sure that if she called her sister, she would pick up immediately, as she always does, and be as cheerful as ever. But the phone rings and rings and no one answers. That’s when it starts to sink in, and then Sophie is mad.
The third emotion is anger. How could Amy leave her like this? How dare she? (But, says a very small voice in her mind, You really left her first.) An all-consuming rage envelops her: rage at Amy, for—for dying, at the world for letting her die, at everything; everything that dared to be alive and warm and happy when Amy was gone.
And then finally the tears come, and Sophie crumbles to the floor and lets the world fall away.
<><><><><>
Sophie is a hundred and three, and she is not dead yet. She doesn’t know why or how, and she doubts anyone in the world does. She is an anomaly, a freak of nature: a woman over a hundred years old, who looks to be no more than twenty-five.
Amy has been dead for forty-three years, and although the grief has not yet left—and probably never will—it has dulled somewhat. And for all the times Sophie cursed her photographic memory when she was young and it only brought her jealousy and resentment from others, now she feels nothing but relief at the prospect that Amy’s face will not fade from her memories.
If Sophie could time travel, she would go back to that fateful day when she found out she had stopped aging, and she would never have left Amy. Never. She would have been by her side until the day she died, no matter how much grief it caused her in the end. Amy’s death had taught Sophie that lesson, at least:
Seize the day. Celebrate every last second with your loved ones because they will not last forever.
Sophie knows that now, and she is determined not to make the same mistake ever again.
Sophie lives in Paris still, her escape from reality, a city that never seems to change over the centuries. Indeed, it was much the same now as it was when she had first traveled here at the age of eighteen. She even lives in the same attic apartment, and although it does look much more rundown now, she can’t bring herself to part with it. She has told the land lady that she is the granddaughter of the eighteen year old version of herself who first rented this apartment, and the woman seems to believe it.
Eighteen seems so long ago now, but then again, everything does.
<><><><><>
Sophie is a hundred and forty-two, and her life is about to change forever. Like one fateful day before, a hundred and thirty years ago, she doesn’t realize it at first.
She grumbles at the insistent knocking on her door that pulls her away from her book.
Her newest apartment has large pictorial windows that look out over the city of her birth. After so many years, she has finally made her way back to San Diego. Trinkets line every shelf, souvenirs of all her travels, and a corkboard holds family photos and letters from fans of her writing. Potted plants and books teeter precariously on all the remaining surfaces.
She opens the door to a man on the threshold. The first thing she notices are his eyes: the exact color of a tropical sea. Teal eyes. Where has she seen teal eyes before?
She remembers being twelve, walking through a museum with a school group, and looking across the room into teal eyes. She remembers a conversation about newspaper articles and dinosaurs. She remembers a boy who disappeared into thin air.
“Hello,” the boy from the museum—grown up but young, wrinkleless and dark-haired, a mystery like herself—says to her now. He holds up a faded and yellowed newspaper clipping with her face on the front. “Is this you?”