The past isn't something I generally remember well. Memories float through my mind every now and then, and when they do, I try and catch them… hold them for as long as I can; savor the warmth of nostalgia. But memories are something that one can't hold. God knows I can't. It's almost like the harder I try to grasp them, to analyze them, the faster they slide away from me, soon to be forgotten in the dusty disarray of my mind. It seems that all my memories are disappearing from me in that fashion—one by one until slowly I'm left with no past at all. I'm just one of the mindless, faceless people that walk the face of this planet… not by choice, but by destiny.

Maybe that's why I am where I am now. I feel so alone in this world, so utterly isolated. I know I'm alive: I'm breathing, I'm feeling,, but I feel so completely dead, dead as the world around me. The scorched brown grass, the unrelenting sun, that damned sun that won't go away, the nonexistent calls of the animals that used to inhabit this world and haunt me with the fact that they're not there. They live on in my memory… another memory that is slipping away and will soon leave me surrounded in a dead world with no place to go. No memories of a better time, when the grass was green and the water blue. It is unspeakable torture to go through every living day knowing that I could have done something about this.

Or maybe I couldn't have.

But the possibility still hangs above my head, like a blade ready to drop at the slightest movement.

Life is hell. I decided that from the first day I woke up from that dammed sleep. I know I was fortunate, I missed the worst of it, that first year of confusion and chaos that forever demented people's minds. But then why am I putting myself through such torture? Why do I endlessly analyze every single detail that I can remember, however few, of that fateful day?

I often think of them. My comrades. I wonder if they're still alive, and if they are, if they are well. If they go through each day as I do, torturing myself with the last events of the previous world that I can remember. I wonder if they have changed as I have. I am no longer General Celes Chere, the Ice Princess of the Empire. I am now merely a shell of the determined, ruthless woman I once was. And with time, I figure that I will only deteriorate more with the agony of the broken shards of my life.

And sometimes I wonder of Kefka. Does he know what he did to this world—which he no doubt continues to do? He single-handedly destroyed any fragment of hope in this world. Of course I realized from the start that there was something wrong with him; no rational person could have thought the way he thought or entertained the ideas he entertained. But I still wonder if what he's done has caught up with him yet. And if it hasn't, I wonder if it ever will. He has single-handedly taken over the world.

Maybe that's the problem with my life. The one single problem that all of the others branched out of. I have too much time to think about things. Right now, my life is pointless. I'm a nobody, just some woman put here by God's will to do some man's bidding. I have no job, I have no family, no friends… I have nothing. Cid is gone, and he was all that was left.

As another memory comes back to me, I find that I can compare quite easily my emotions. That moment when the airship cracked in half, that feeling that bubbled up inside of me and possessed me to scream, that feeling of regret and fear and desperation and utter failure… Is comparable to what I feel now.

I have nothing. I make no impact on the world, sitting here on this large rock on this desolate, uninhabited island. Yet while I have nothing to gain, I continue to torture myself. What I need most is peace. Yes, peace. As I now stand and walk to the edge of this small cliff, overlooking the water rushing in torrents below me among the fragments of rocks that peek up above the water's surface, I ponder over the meaning of peace. Perhaps peace is what I need.

And the realization hits me: I have nothing to live for, and as long as I continue living, I will surely die inside. So as I stand here, teetering on the border of life and death, possessed by my torment and desolation, I fall. And right before I hit the water, I know that I am right. Only in death is there peace.