I can feel her gaze following me as I walk towards the floatation device that will carry me to the other end of the immense building. I resist the urge to turn and look at her and quickly step onto the thin strip of metal, gripping the safety bars tightly and nearly manage to steal a glance at her as I move at break-neck speed, being drawn by a gigantic magnet.

For the past few days, I had felt that someone was staring at me whenever I walked through this particular side of the building. It was only yesterday that I found out that this certain someone was a young woman; at least, someone who looks like a young woman anyway, for who can tell another person’s age nowadays?

After a week of being stared at, I tell myself that enough is enough. Instead of walking straight to the floatation device, I take a side turn and face that impertinent lady. She looks shocked when she sees me face-to-face and hurriedly drops her glance. I had wanted to march up to her and demand an explanation, but my brain is suddenly filled with pictures of a lily in an ice slab and a necklace with a jasper stone.

I feel dizzy. I take a pill from a box every citizen in the city has to carry to counter that and the dizziness gradually dimmed. When I feel well enough to confront the lady in question, she has disappeared. It is a strange occurrence indeed, but I have an upcoming important surgery to concentrate on and some unknown woman related to frozen flowers and gemstones is not going to disrupt that.

As expected, my surgery was a success. A few decades earlier, I had devised a workable method to prolong the average life span of a human being. In those archaic days, you could live up to 125 years of age by popping pills day in day out. With just a simple surgery, I can add half a century to that, and without pills to boot. You see, although I have not discovered why exactly the cells in our body stop regenerating halfway through a human’s life, I had found out that our brains were meant to live forever.

The procedure has a similar concept with taking cells from bone marrows, only that those cells will die eventually, but mutated brain cells will not. By taking some brain cells and mutating it before injecting it again into the bloodstream, living up to two or even three centuries should, theoretically, not be a problem. Provided you are willing to pay what losing brain cells in any amount, insignificant though it may seem, will bring. But looking at my lucrative and expanding business, most people would. They do not mind anything as long as they can enjoy another decade of life; whatever the quality.

I am planning a joint venture with a notable cryonics company. I believe with a few tweakings, my method, experimental though it may seem, will be able to bring back to life again those dead from old age. I feel pleased with myself that I am able to cheat death. After all, my 130th birthday is coming soon. A timid tap on my shoulder interrupts my reverie. It is the lady who had kept staring at me. She is holding an envelope. A love letter, presumably. I grin as she presses it into my hand and walks away.

I gently tear open the envelope and am surprised to find only three words in the place of the expected confessions of love. “Please remember. Iris.” My brain floods once more with images of carnations covered in a glass coffin and swinging opaque amethysts. As my head spins once again, worry and doubt plague me. That mysterious woman affected me in a way that is alien to me. All this mental pictures and dizziness, they are trying to tell me something, but what?

I had gone to consult a notable psychiatrist today. However, the visit brought me no solace. Her theory is that the woman must be somehow connected to a repressed memory of some kind. This she said with a professional air as she schedule another appointment with me next week. Over the weekend, my dreams were filled with flowers in ice and semi-precious stones.

Today being a workday, I had prepared myself to face the woman once again. What I had not readied myself for is the woman herself holding a bunch of amaranths, the eternal flower, beckoning me to share her metal ionised bench. In an effort to overcome my bewilderment, I walk slowly but steadily towards her. My steps falter as predictably, my vision blurs with images of tulips with beads of water in their petals and beryls forming where the droplets had plummeted down.

I struggle against the accompanying dizziness that the surreal images always arrive with and seated myself next to the lady with great difficulty. She puts a slim hand on my shoulder and my blood raced. And that had nothing to do with the visible concern that crosses her elegant facial features. I blink repeatedly to clear my head and the pictures recede into the inner recesses of my memory, ever ready to pounce again.

“I have to go. But before I do, I really hope you can remember.” Her enigmatic words barely conceal a hidden appeal. My eyes asked a question. She lets go of my shoulder and murmured, “I am Iris…” As her words trail off, my mind threatens to shut down with pictures of irises in the moonlight, glistening with dew. I put my head in my hands, willing those pictures to go away, and that seem to help.

“You see, I died…” Her voice rang out hollowly. “I was revived just two weeks before, after years of being preserved in low temperatures by cryonics. My first thought was to find you, with past memories flowing in my head. But I understand you cannot remember…something about a surgery you had and pioneered?” She turned to look away as I nod.

That is the drawback of everlasting life. You forget. I am trying a new technique where only selected memories get removed, but the prospect looks grim. Memories of your childhood would be the first ones to go, and slowly but surely the loss of brain cells will lead you to the lanes of time where your memories will just be a swirling mist of nothingness.

My clients know that. They had all signed a contract absolving me from any blame whatsoever, in the advent of the sure loss of memories. They know the risks. I know the risks. But I had wanted to live longer as my life’s purpose is as yet unfulfilled. My goal is to live as long as possible so that I can…so that I may…I shook my head. I cannot recall why.

“We once loved…at the very least, I once loved you. And I still do.” Her hands are visibly trembling as she tries not to cry. I look up in surprise, all my family members had died not allowing me to meddle with their heads, for they thought that living longer that what God had allowed naturally is a blaspheme and an abomination of nature. As such, she is definitelynota relative. So then, who is she?

Irises…that persistent motif of flowers and jewels…what does that mean? “Tell me.” I demand hoarsely. I have to know, no matter what it takes. She leans down to face me, and I glimpse a pendant of green agate, of a lady with a single dragonfly wing. She sees me staring, and smiles wanly. She holds the pendant up and says, “This is a good way to start…” And then she told me. Of love filled with whispered promises, shortened by death.

My skin tingles. My mind is trying to tell me something, but I keep pushing it aside. My eyes brighten with recognition for a moment, but the moment passed, and my soul remains glazed. I tell her that it is too much of an effort to remember, too much pain to be dredged up, too distant to be ever grasped again. Then she kissed me. My mind sears with internal pain, my body jerks spasmodically, my eyes roll back.

I do not want to remember. I know the consequences if I do. The mutated brain cells will react. Definitely. If they ever attempt to recover their lost functions, I will die. She is cruel. She does not seem to care. Her eyes flash at my apparent selfishness. I can tell that she is devastated, yet too angry to allow it to be seen. I crumple.

I do not know what to do. Accepting this lady will mean loss of everything I have now. Everything. How can I put it to her in a way that she can understand? That she should move on with her life, and leave the past behind, no matter how beautiful and promising the past may be? After a few minutes of silence while I contemplate the best way to phrase my thoughts, I turn to her and try to begin. No words came out. The speech that seemed so eloquent in my head turned to nothing when my eyes meet hers.

My eyes drop and become fixated by the green pendant she is wearing. It seems to glow in front of my eyes. Again, a severe reaction overtakes me as all my limbs jerk. Weariness overcomes me when it is over and she takes this opportunity to again tell me her story. Our story. I am in no condition to resist as she goes on and on, continuing despite my bodily reactions to her tale. My eyes close as I feel my body functions halt to a stop.

It is in this state of complete helplessness and immobility that I can finally acknowledge her, acknowledge our past together, acknowledge the part of me that I had thought I had lost forever. My life’s purpose? Was it to find her? Who knows. I do not care. It all seems so inconsequential in the face of the revelation that I had found myself. Suddenly I was struck with the thought that if I were to die, she would be left alone again. Alone after all these years in cold ice. This I tell her amid rasps and gasps.

She smiles wanly and shakes her head. She is going to die anyway, she tells me. Revival from cryonics has not been as smooth as everyone had hoped. She has a day to live, maybe less. That is the reason she has sought me, knowing she has nothing to lose, not anymore. She wants to me to remember that I had once loved a woman named Iris, and that woman loved me still. She wants me to know that amid all the technology, a man can never be whole, complete, if his past memories were lost, the good with the bad.

I nod, my energy leaving me. I could see where I went wrong now, thinking that a longer lifespan justifies the loss of the past, which in a way, is a death by itself. Just more unnatural. The ways of the surgery will be lost when I am gone, since I had thought I would continue living, forever and ever, there is no need to teach my methods to others, but there are notes, my research papers. There was the other doctor that did the surgery for me, but he was dead. This I manage to convey to her, along with instructions to destroy them the best way she knows how. She turns to leave with the keys to my apartment and laboratory when a thought occurs to her. “Will you be alright until I return?” I close my eyes and nod a faint yes as I slip into a haze of memories, which the amaranths that she has left behind seem to enhance.

I thought I had awakened from the dead when she gently shook me awake and told me that the deed was done. This time, I take her hand and smile with the completeness of what I had finally remembered. Horror filled me at the sheer thought I had simply forgotten about her existence. I could not fathom how I managed to live all these years without her, and yet the cruel irony is that once I found her, or she had found me, rather, I am to lose her all over again. But somehow, that small detail does not matter. All that matters is I remember now.

As we sat there holding hands, gazing at our reflections in the mirror before us, we smile. We could feel death approaching stealthily and remember that mirrors were once believed to be gateways to an alternate world. Perhaps in an alternate reality, as the light fades around us, we can actually live happily ever after.