[ WP ] You wake up on exact date of your 5th birth date in your 5 year old body , with your current memory .

Five years ago the clocks started turning back. I open my eyes and see nothing. I feel nothing below or above me. I feel the absence of things. The absence of my flesh, my bones, my body, my mind. All that is left is awareness. I see nothing but the absence of colour. It ’ s not a black darkness. It ’ s simply nothing. The interior of a black hole. I recall news of a black hole lingering along the edges of our solar system. All that time ago. Four years ago. When the clocks started turning back. I hear nothing. Until there is a something. A small thing. A voice. I listen. There are more voices. The sounds are human. How long has it been since I ’ ve heard a human? The sounds scratch along my now present attention. They carve into my hearing. They are horrid, wretched things. Voices screaming. Growing loud and desperate. How many voices? Billions. This is the birth of our species. We are born screaming. It ’ s all we know to do. We have screamed for eternity. Within this empty space. 
 
 I feel myself being pulled towards a direction. I close my eyes and open them to the world as a baby. Seconds old. My mother is screaming. I open my eyes and look into hers. I remember hearing her voice in that empty space. Within the black hole. She watches me live. She dies moments later. The screaming has stopped. 
 
 I begin my life. I live again. I meet a young girl called Valeria. She smiles easily. She laughs tender sounds that pull at my heart. I ’ m too young to be profound but she makes me feel so safe. So cherished. I am thirty years old. I bump into a woman I knew when she was a girl. Valeria looks annoyed to see me. She lives in the future. Where the world is turning. I live within the past. Where the people are trapped and screaming and alone. I live within the past when Valeria and I were in love. She ’ s waiting for the cab to come, her foot tapping against the sidewalk. Her eyes glancing at her watch every few minutes. I ’ m eager to reunite our lives through some kind of friendship. I ’ m so eager to know her again, as she was when she was a child. But Valeria lives within the future. I live within the past. Have the two ever gotten along? Have they ever even met? 
 
 Valeria gets in the cab. She wasn ’ t rude. She wasn ’ t cruel. I was looking. Desperate to find something within the present for us to hold onto and become. But I live in the past. Where we ’ re still in love. And she just saw a stranger. Someone from an age ago. Trying to create a life from the death of a memory. Her childhood self knew me. As I knew her then. But we are strangers in the present. We have never done so well in the present. 
 
 One year ago the world stopped turning. People ran through the streets, naked and terrified. They declared the end of the world. A voice rose in my mind: do you remember? I close my eyes. I recline into the silence of acceptance. Yes, I remember. The clocks are turning back. And so it goes again and again. Until we reach infinity. 
 
 I am five years old. I hear someone call “ Valeria ” out across the street. Turning my head, I see her again. Our eyes meet. She smiles a greeting my way. Lovely Valeria. I smile in return. No longer human. My smile does n't belong on this child's face. It's the smile of a creature who has lived and died and has been dying for forever. Her eyes widen. Remembering what she sounded like, screaming in that darkness, I turn away to continue within this life. Living in the future this time. Like that young woman had. 
 
 I am sixteen and I hear someone call out “ Valeria ”. I remember my lives. My deaths. My pathetic existences. I began to weep. Am I still so small against this world? Against the powers of time that control my motions and days like a puppet on a string that extends along forever? Valeria asks if I ’ m alright. I run like my legs are on fire. I run into traffic. I die like the fool I am. With Valeria calling my name. 
 
 How did she know my name? We had never met. 
 
 There was once a child named Valeria. She grew her life and catered it to the future. With her remembered wisdom and creativity, she grew into an individual who could control the weather. She could control the way the earth moved. She could shift seas with a thought. Move mountains with a grin. One day, she swept her gaze across the shape of the world. She lived countless lives. At different ages. She lived and never died. She marked the day she would turn back the clocks. Telling time, “ Why don ’ t we stop the world? Only for a little? ” 
 
 Time replied, “ Pausing the world would be the death of me. But I can turn it back. Would you like that? ” 
 
 Valeria smiled her easy smile. Her thoughts grew calm. “ Yes. Let ’ s do that. ” 
 Valeria watched the world live in reverse. She watches the humans filter slowly from existence. This is a kinder sort of apocalypse. One where the creatures of the earth know not what is happening. They simply slither out of existence. Like smoke from the fire that humanity had become. 
 
 She heard someone calling her name. Across the street, she caught the eyes of a boy who was the same age she appeared as. She caught his gaze, looked deep within his mind and stopped. He remembered. He remembered it all. 
 The boy ran. Then ran again. He ran into traffic. He sprinted into other lives which were not made to be his own. Valeria followed on the outskirts of these existences. Poor, foolish boy. He refused to die. 
 
 Valeria lives forever. He dies within another kind of forever. A forever that only fools would consider living. Time has worked in reverse ever since that day. But I remain the same. We all remain the same. Until we filter out like dying lights littered across an empty sky. We will remain the same. As is the way the world ends. Was it with a whimper or a bang? I forget. All I do these days is forget and forget. Until all that ’ s left is nothing. 

