She kissed him goodbye, knowing he wouldn’t remember her tomorrow. She didn’t care at the moment, she wanted to remember him as clearly as possible, from the sound of his voice to the feeling of his lips. She slipped out of the apartment afterwards, stealing one last glance as he waved her off, a silly gesture, but one she knows she’ll treasure forever as the last thing he did for her. He had bought her flowers, baked cakes, even helped her organize her mother’s funeral, but none of that would be as important as that wave goodbye, none would stick out in her mind as clearly as it would forever.

After arriving back at her apartment, she closed her door and reeled backward into herself, she couldn’t bear to exist for the next couple of hours, knowing what was happening just a couple blocks away to a man who didn’t deserve it. She tried to think of others to block out the pain, but each one just brought more pain with them. 

The boy she knew in Maine in 1982, the last thing he did was say “I loved that movie, we should see another one sometime”. The girl she met in 1879, the last thing she did was share a smidgen of eye contact before blushing and averting her gaze. The girl she had met in England in 1674, the last thing she did was blow a kiss to her. Each one etches deeper within her psyche, each one she remembers, but they will never be able to remember her. She knows they can’t. She’s died before and knows there is no hell, so there must not be a heaven, and if there is truly nothing, then there is nowhere to recollect her from.

She sat on the floor, fighting the urge to do what she always did, but it was no use. Running back down the street, just minutes since she last saw him, her shoes falling off as her feet carried her as fast as they could, just to make it to the scene of the inevitable. She arrived at his house, where she had just left him, minutes before, but the lights inside were off, he had already gone to bed.

Maybe I could just wake him? Maybe I can finally warn one of them? She reasoned with herself. But she knew the walls were already up, she didn’t even need to touch the one in front of the door to know it was there. But she tried to knock anyway, leading her hand to hit the solid force inches away from the door, making no discernable sound, and forcing her backward, onto the ground. She could feel the tears carving their ways down her cheeks as they had done countless times before, she asked herself why she couldn’t stop doing this to herself, knowing she would never have an answer to that question.

She could feel the wall to her right begin to push her farther down the street, she tried in vain to fight it as she had all the other times, but it wasn’t persuaded in the slightest, pushing her far enough down the street so that she could watch it unfold, but the participants wouldn’t see her there. A masked man was coming down the street.

She was walking down a street just like this when it happened.

Someone from behind stabbed her between the ribs, she wasn’t sure which ones, but she knew they must’ve been important, because soon after the pain was registered, nothing else was. People never fully prepared her for nothingness, nothing ever truly could. True nothingness is impossible, yet it happened to her. 

When suddenly, something.

She felt the air rushing through her fresh stab wound. And as she realized this, she realized she could realize again. Nothingness had lost its grip on her somehow, and she opened her eyes. She sat up in the street, whoever had taken her life had long since fled the scene, and she looked down at her dress. The stain was dark crimson, and it had stretched all down her dress in the angle she had laid down in. She ripped the rest of the fabric and looked at her wound, still agape, but no longer bleeding, the blood had coagulated, and not just in her wound, but all throughout her body, that’s when she realized her heart was no longer beating. 

Before she could begin to process what had happened, she appeared. She was shocked at all the blood and asked what had happened. She looked up and saw her, a gorgeous woman in a victorian dress. All around her was a thick haze, as if everything was out of focus apart from this woman. She didn’t know what that meant yet. The two of them stared at each other for what felt like forever but she didn’t want it to end. She had to die to find out what love felt like, and she didn’t want it to pass. The woman began tending to her wound, stitching it shut and commenting all the while as she scrambled to come up with some logical excuse for all of it, after all, why tell the truth if you can’t understand it yourself? The two shared a long while together before she got up and insisted she was alright. The woman begrudgingly agreed to let her return home alone, blowing a kiss as a sort of goodbye before turning around. But she soon discovered that the attacker never truly left.

The front window was broken, he was killed and his body dragged and left in the street like a dog, and just as the last iotas of life dripped from his cold lips, she could feel the wall’s power lift. She stumbled over to the corpse, who was definitely not remembering anything now, and looked into his eyes. Once blue, full of life, waving goodbye, now a cold nothingness rested behind them waving goodbye in a whole new way.

How many more times must she endure this? How many more times must she meet someone so doomed yet fall in love anyways? Why has her fate been entwined with those who with inevitably meet theirs shortly after meeting her? Why will she always be the last person they’ll ever see if they’ll never be able to remember her?