Dear Diary,
I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t know what I am anymore.
A long time ago, I had a name. There was a face that went with it—a face people knew. Was I young? Old? Beautiful? Scarred? I can’t even remember the sound of my own laughter—if I ever truly laughed.
Why am I here? Who was I?
No one answers. No one can answer. My friends, my family, my parents… they’re gone, swallowed by the abyss of time. I have outlived every soul who once knew my name. They’re gone. Time took them, one by one, while I remained, left behind with a curse I don’t understand.
I have died twenty times.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
When will it end? I am so tired. I don't want to live, but I don’t want to die, either.
Death has come for me twenty times over, each time pulling me into its dark embrace. But it is never true death. Each time, I wake again, in another life, another body, but with the same memories. Perhaps others are trapped here, too, but gifted the mercy of forgetting, the grace of starting anew. But me? I remember everything.
My own memories torment me, like ghosts that follow me from body to body, from era to era. They whisper to me in the night, faces of strangers I once loved, voices calling out to me from the past lives. I hear them even now, calling, pleading. I see them in flashes, fragments of hands reaching out as they withered and died, while I… I remained.
Now, even those memories are fading. Maybe this is mercy at last. Or maybe it is the final punishment—a slow erasure of all that I am, until there’s nothing left of me.
Maybe this is the end, after all. Because now… I don’t even remember what I’m trying to forget.