Marta was dreaming. She knew this in the way that one knows how to breath. She also knew, in the very back of her mind, that she was about to wake up, because she had realized she was dreaming.
When she'd been a bit younger, around the age of sixteen, she'd been really into the concept of lucid dreams. She'd watched videos about techniques to increase her chances at a lucid dream, of things that one should and shouldn't do in a lucid dream ,like thinking about bad things, because they would most likely appear to scare her and reinforce their presence with that fear. At the time, she'd thought about what would happen if she were to begin thinking about spiders: would a giant eight legged and furry monstrosity appear from a door and try to tear her in half? Would it hiss at her and try to bind her in a cocoon of webs to afterwards eat her? At the time, the idea had actually scared her.
Nowadays, though, she knew that her fear of those little scuttling things had been unfounded and senseless: spiders were much more scared of her than she was of them and, in truth, they were actually kind of cute. Also, they ate mosquitoes, so because of that alone she thought they were deserving of a great amount of kindness and respect. She hoped, one day, to finally get enough money to buy herself one of those giant spider plushies you could sometimes see people make memes about online.
Anyways, at the point in life she was at, spiders weren't what scared her most. No, that was her mother, and she made semi-regular appearances in most of her nightmares (the few she could remember), mostly as being angry for some reason or another (probably something stupid. It was always something stupid) or as a sort of background ghost to haunt the back of her thoughts in those dreams, a reminder that she'd done something wrong and she knew and was about to come yell at her and punish her and...
It was exhausting. Every time she woke up from those dreams she felt more tired than when she'd laid down to sleep and, always, for a minute or two, she had to stay laid down and stare at the ceiling, dividing her memory of the dream from her memories of reality, telling her brain that 'No, we've done nothing wrong, she's not going to yell at us'.
Or maybe, even worse, start a 'discussion'. Her mother of so liked her discussions.
Luckily for her, right now, she wasn't dreaming of something like that. Instead, she was having a rather fuzzy dream of playing cards with a technicolor cat with the Mad Hatter's hat on top of his very fluffy looking ears. She knew that, if she won this round at PokUno-Oh, she would be allowed to pet his royal belly.
Sadly, as she placed her final card down and won, the dream became even more fuzzy and, in the end, she woke up, just two minutes before her phone's alarm was supposed to start ringing. Sometimes she wondered why she even bothered to set it up: her biological clock always woke her up two minutes before her alarm. Then she remembered the one time it hadn't, how she'd woken up late and misses the first two lessons of the day, and the discussion she'd had afterwards with her mother on the phone. Yeah, that was why.
Slowly, saddened by her inability to pet His Majesty the Cat Hatter, she got up from her bed, reached in the total darkness of her room for the pills she knew were waiting on the bedside table, fumbled for a moment looking for an unpopped one, and popped it right into her mouth, feeling it begin to dissolve under her tongue. Two more years of this and she would possibly manage to clean her apartment without needing to wear a mask. Her allergies had been getting better in the last year since she'd started this therapy.
Then she fell back down in bed, phone in hand. She turned off the alarm for the day before it could go off, as always, and as always imagined that one day her phone would just tell her to fuck off, showing her a photo of a middle finger, before turning off her alarm once and for all.
She began lazily scrolling through Webtoon, reading cute little comics about people having much more interesting lives than her and, even with all the trouble, better ones.
And that way, half an hour passed.
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A man wondered: what is immortality? Can it be possible? Is it more than just a madman's dream?
And so it was that God said: "Heed me: I am immortal. I created the world as you know it, and I'll be there to watch its end."
But then the skeptic said: "You were born the day we chose that you exist. One day, we will choose to forget you, or we will disappear, and with us, you'll be gone, like a cloud in the sky."
And so God wilted away.
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The microwave reached 1 second on the countdown to its ticking time bomb and secret agent Marta, Code Name 001 (because she was number 1! Yay!) managed to press the stop button just in time to stop it from exploding! No, really, the damn thing was so loud when it reached 0. And she didn't want to disturb her neighbors on the... oh, right, her neighbors on this floor had been kicked out.
Well, she still did it to have some mercy on her ears, and not to disturb too much the soft music playing from her phone.
As she took the glass of milk out of the microwave she hummed along to the song, 'Father's Lament' by Poor Man's Poison. She'll admit that she'd found out about the group thanks to all the videos and animations on YouTube about their most recent and most well known song, 'Hell's Coming With Me', which, by the way, was a masterpiece. But, she liked to think, unlike most other people, she'd gone and listened to many of their other songs, and while not all fo them she liked, some, like this, she'd fallen in love with.
She sat down at the small table in her kitchen-dining room and began dipping chocolate chip biscuits in her milk. It was bad for her sugar, she knew that for a fact after the last blood test she'd had, but that was a problem for future Marta. Also, she'd been going on for the last two weeks on cereals for breakfast and her body demanded its sweet damnation in the form of 'Gocciole', her most beloved cookies since she could remember as a child.
She began eating, belatedly sending a good morning to her mother as she hoped she wouldn't be too angered by the fact she hadn't done that first thing as she'd woken up. She'd just forgotten in her sleep addled state with an extra coating of Webtoon numbness.
She kept eating as 'Entrance' from the game Cytus II began playing and she let her imagination wander, imagining a woman with an insane glint in her eyes laugh as she imagine her own OC, a woman with a mad glint in her eyes, dark hair and a charming smile, wearing a lab coat yellowed by the passage of the years, playing said song on a piano and feeding her own insanity to demons around her, causing them to go mad with bloodlust and assaulting an incoming army where people were beginning to fight among themselves as they got a taste of the madness lying behind her eyes.
She smiled appreciatively at the mental image and, when the song ended, she opened her Spotify (cracked, naturally, because who in their right mind would buy something if they could get it for free?), went back to that song and put it on repeat. She needed the boost of self esteem that fantasy gave her, and that song was too connected with it.
She proceeded through her usual morning routine, washing her teeth and face, putting on some light make up (not much though, it wasn't really worth it), hiding a few small pimples, and she was out, headphones plugged in her phone and playing songs in her ears.
As she walked on the bus her mum called her, wishing her a good morning.
"WHy are you out this early in the morning?" she asked.
Marta managed to not sigh outwardly, knowing full well how bad an idea that was, before she answered: "You know the answer to that mum. I'm gonna get to the station with the bus, and then I'm gonna walk to university."
"But the bus can bring you closer to uni. It can get you as far as the center of the city, and from there it's fifteen minutes to uni."
"Yes mu, I know, I live here, but a fifteen minute walk isn't much of a walk to begin with."
"As if thirty minutes was any better."
"It's surely better than fifteen. And I like it."
"No, you can't be liking something like that. It's winter, outside it's cold, and it's still dark -"
"The sun is already rising mum."
"-and you know I don't like the train station. Druggies and migrants are there. What if they do something to you?"
"Mum, there's basically a police car there all the time. And if it's not the police then it's the military."
Which wasn't strictly true. The cops usually arrived around eight or nine in the morning together with the morning rush. When she arrived at the station it would barely be seven and a half, they wouldn't be there, but her mother didn't have to know.
"I don't care! You shouldn't go there! Tell me the truth, you're actually meeting someone there! Are you doing drugs?"
For a single moment Martha couldn't answer, trying to understand what kind of fucking connection there could possibly be between her going out for walks early in the morning and her supposedly doing drugs. Just... why?
"Mum, I'm not doing drugs, you brought me up better than that."
Even though you always say that I'm just a selfish little leech who only thinks about herself and has accomplished nothing in her entire life.
Her mother stayed silent for a moment, then, finally, said: "I don't like it. I don't want you to do this anymore."
"Mum -"
"Don't mum me. You're acting strange, I can see that. Why else would you want to wake up at six in the morning when you could be sleeping 'till seven and be much more refreshed."
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
And then she started, and Marta tuned her out and began looking at the people around her who were ignoring her, looking at their phones or chatting lightly among themselves. She wondered if there was a single boy or girl her age in this bus who had her same issues with a control-freak mother who thought the world (her family was part of said world) existed to attempt to fuck with her and ruin everything she worked on.
Finally, her mother stopped blabbering on as she reached the train station and got off. She hummed some sad-sounding responses in her heaphones' microphone and, finally, clicked the call closed.
Then, sighing as she began preparing psychologically for a hopefully short discussion that evening on her right to have a walk whenever she wanted to get to her university, she put on a podcast, 'Hello From the Hallowoods', and began marching slowly. She had time, and she wanted to savor Nick's stories.
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Then the Scientist spoke: "The universe is endlessly exapnding ever outwards. Surely, that is immortal!"
And the answer, for a time, was satifactory, until other Scientists joined the conversation with their newer knowledge and theories, and said: "No, one day the stars will burn out, everything will be plunged in cold darkness, and all will turn to dust and disappear. Not even the Universe is immortal."
And so they watched as the stars, one by one, began winking out.
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"Hello guys!" she waved at her friends as they walked into the class and marched towards her.
Clara and Arnold waved and smiled, and the expressions seemed genuine to her. Or maybe they just were that good at faking it.
Clara sat beside her, while Arnold took a seat in front, taking out his notepad and pens and beginning to look over his notes from yesterday, while Clara began blabbering on about how anxious she was about an exam she needed to pass but couldn't and how anxious she was and could Marta maybe help her out, give her some exercises, correct them with her, and explain things, and had she asked to that other friend of hers from the next year if he could help...
And Marta smiled and helped and answered, because that's what friends do. No, she didn't have any more exercises, she'd given her all the ones she had, maybe she should look some up on the internet. Yes, she would gladly look at the four pages of exercises she did yesterday and correct them. Yes, she'd asked her friend from next year, he'd answered that he would gladly help (a good thing, because Marta wasn't that good at this subject. She'd passed the exam, but barely).
And then, while she corrected the exercises, trying to remember what she'd studied nearly a year ago, she watched from the corner of her eye as Clara andArnold began speaking among themselves, and when she finished and gave Clara her notebook with the corrections she thanked her and then went back to talking with him and Marta just sat there, listening but not feeling part of this conversation. An outsider. And that feeling of loneliness that was ever present in the back of her mind since that year in middle school when everyone had abandoned her, when the person she'd called a friend had stabbed her in the back, leaving her behind to fend for herself, grew up to show its ugly little head.
She squashed it back, smiling as she listened, as her mother's words resounded from that little demon's mouth:
You don't have any friends!
What about Arnold and Clara? What about my group from high school?
Arnold and Clara aren't friends. They're acquaintaces at best! True friends go out and spend time together as often as they can, not just in university. Same goes for your high school group. You've all gone your own way.
Well, it's not my fault that we have to study so we can't go out!
No, it is. True friends can find some time.
Finally she shut it up, but the fact remained: she felt like an outsider here.
Then the professor walked in, and the lessons began, an endless droning of words and words and words.
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In truth, I always thought that immortality was impossible for one much more simpe reason: change.
People change all the time. Every minute of their life, they change, they die, they are reborn. Their bodies, their cells, they wither away, disappearing, while also growing back, in an equilibrium that, sooner or later, will be broken, bringing upon them the final change, the final death.
People change all the time, and because of that they will never be immortal. For immortality is the idea of something never changing. Haaa, the proverbial ship of Theseus, dismantled at last.
Our very nature that precludes us from immortality.
And, truth be told: it is better that way.
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She was back home now, preparing lunch.
She wished her parents a good lunch over the phone, and her mother sounded completely normal after the discussion they'd had that morning. Not unsurprising. The woman was, by her own admission (and that of her parents, Marta's grandparents) like dynamite: she was explosive when she got angry, but after the explosion it was like nothing had ever beent there to begin with.
Marta had always wondered why her mother didn't try to correct this side of herself. Why did she have to change to suit other people and what society and her mother thought was best, but her mother couldn't change this side of her.
Well, she'd asked her once, and the answer had been: I'm sorry Marta, but I'm like this. Always have been. I cannot change.
Which, as you can well imagine, had left her with a bitter taste in her mouth.
Because what her mother always forgot about explosions was this: sure, the fire that had caused it may have disappeared together with the dynamite, but it damaged everything around it. And if you keep making things explode, sooner or later there will be too much rubble to make anything out of it.
That was more or less how she saw her relationship with her mother: a pile of rubble that had once been a building.
A building that had started to fall down the day she'd walked into elementary school.
Now, after lunch, she stared at her university books and notes.
She stared. And stared. And stared some more.
Then she sat up from her chair in her small study (the apartment was big. That much she had to give to her parents), walked towards the small living room, sat down on the sofa and turned on the television. It was one of those big ones that had access to internet and everything. She mostly used it to watch YouTube these days. Sure, it was full of ads, which was annoying, but it was the best around. She could've used her computer, where she had some anti-ads installed, but the damn thing was monitored by her mother through an app she'd installed there, and she could see every time she turnded the thing on, how much time she spent on it and what she used it for. She'd have to wait for the evening to come to use it in relative safety and without risk of starting a discussion.
She sat in front of the TV.
And her thoughts reminded her that she was losing time, that she should be studying, that if she kept going like this she wouldn't have a future.
But she couldn't do it. She was... tired. So tired. Routine and her near-obsession with the passage of time was the only reason she moved out of bed most mornings these days, and she knew that if she decided to sit down at that desk she wouldn't be able to concentrate on studying.
She'd done enough of that for thirteen years of her life, from elementary to high school. Studying every day of her life, trying to be the best for her future, trying to make her mother and father happy, to keep everything running smootly so there wouldn't be any discussions on her attitude and how she didn't respect all her parents' sacrifices to make her study and give her everything she had.
She had studied and studied, always with the fear that if she didn't get top marks or close to the top she would be berated and punished with the removal of the few things she had to pass the little free time he had: her games, her books, her computer and TV shows. There was never enough time to go out with friends, because she had to study hard! And then at school she had been an idiot, flaunting her intelligence, her high marks, hoping that people would notice her, would see that she was great and would want to befriend her. But it didn't work, so she tried harder, but it never worked and the boys and girls didn't want to spend time with her.
Middle school was more of the same, only then she realized, after her best friend had abandoned her, that flaunting how good she was wouldn't help her get friends. It would only hinder her.
But then, what could she talk about with the others? She didn't like sports, she liked games and books, but everyone seemed to only talk about things that weren't what she knew, and she didn't know where to start to build herself her little clique.
Then, finally, she found other people like her, outcasts like her, and they even liked the same things she liked! It was great!
You and your friends only talk about video games, I don't like that.
Always those words.
That's the only thing you have in common, it won't last. You should stop spending so much time in the internet and instead go out and make yourself some better friends.
But she had to study. Always study to be good, for the future. Always think about the future.
When could she get new friends when she had barely the time to live?
Just like in elementary school, she graduated as one of the people with the highest grades. Her final presentation at the oral exam was praised by the professors and kept to be shown to the future generations as an example of what a great work looked like. She'd felt so proud!
Then came high school.
And while she managed to make herself some friends, keeping the old ones, the disliked ones, she wasn't much better.
Her parents kept telling her that she shoud spend less time on electronical things, even if at that point her time on them was reduced to an hour, two at most, each evening, because she had to study, because she had to go to the gym and train in martial arts (they had forced her to start, but she found out it was a great outlet for her stress. But not enough), she had to do stretches for her spine, because that had gone to shit too.
Then she started having trouble to breath, and she found out, after many visits to many doctors, that it wasn't an illness, that it was all her pent up stress that had fucked up her breathing. She liked to joke with herself that she'd get as far as forty years old and then her heart would join her lungs and kill her.
HIgh school was when she came to hate discussions and hate even more the word attitude. If she could've, she would've gladly deleted it from every dictionary and mind in this world.
It was hard, oh o hard. The bump in difficulty was great, and no matter how much she studied, sometimes it just wasn't enough. And her mother was all about attitude this, attitude that, you have the wrong attitude to life, and all that.
On her third year, she had to repeat a subject during summer physics. Her professor sucked at explaining the subject, and she was no good with the formulas and numbers. She was great whenever it came to biology, she wanted to be a doctor after all, but not with numbers. So she lost an entire summer to get ready for the exam, not resting a single day, and she did it! And what did she get from her mother?
I hope this taught you a lesson. I hope it won't happen again.
It hadn't.
The next two summers she lost preparing for the admittance exam for medicine, again, with no rest for her.
She graduated from high school with a score of 98 out of 100. Great, but not enough to get a scholarship. And what had her mother said when she'd found out?
Well, you could've striven for those final two points. Had you not had to repeat that subject two years ago surely you could've done it.
It had been a joke. She'd even said it with a smile at the restaurant table, while Marta's uncle had looked at her like she was a stain on the world for even daring to say that as a joke. Her mother had never liked her uncle. She, on the other hand, had always loved the expansive man with an easy laugh and no qualms about saying what he thought of people. Like the fact that her mother was too strict.
Then the time for the admittance test came.
And she'd failed.
But she had a plan B.
A plan B that had brought her here.
In front of that TV.
She'd realised something halfway through her first year of Uni: she'd spent all her life thinking about her future. She'd lived for that future, worked hard for it every single day of her life.
She'd never once actually lived in the present. Even the days at amusement parks, the holidays in the mountains or at the beach, it had all been a means to give her the strength to keep working for that future.
The day she'd realised that she'd lost all her desire to work for that future.
Was it the right thing to do? To stop now? No, it wasn't, she knew it.
But she didn't care. She couldn't bring herself to care anymore.
The future had had her for all her life. Now, it could wait.
That night she ate dinner, listening to some relaxing songs.
She had a discussion with her mother about her morning walks to the university. She managed to get the right to have them.
She washed herself and played for a short while on her computer, but not too long so as not to upset her mother. Then she went to bed, read a book, and fell asleep.
That night, she didn't dream.
The next morning, she woke up in an unfamiliar bed, in an unknown place.