Aida remembered to breathe, once in a while. She didn't want to, but it would come; gasps of air that startled her into being every now and then.

It was a mystery about Aida's life after her confidantes were gone. With no one left to listen, she had nothing left to say. Her phone went unanswered, her mail unread. Life was a grave from which she was slowly digging her way out.

Maybe her world had been unplugged all this time.

Maybe the power had just never been turned on.

Maybe, she thought, she had been teetering on the edge of gray all along.

There was no one left to save her as she swallowed pill after pill after pill, no one left to stop her from closing her eyes, smiling and fading away.

Aida was gone. She had felt too old to live when she really had been too young to die; there had been more than gray, when she had been colorblind.

In the end, she had been nothing but a collection of facts, accumulated like dust in a drawer. Old letters, a photograph or two, a tape of love songs. It was her father who was to find this drawer, just as he had found her, lying in bed, cold as ice.

"Come over around eight," she had told him.

Dead.

"I'll cook you dinner," she had said.

But it was too late for dinner. It was too late for anything.

The world was over, as she blinked and faded off the planet.

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