To the end of the world.

He is thirty years old.
Now, one doesn't suddenly become thirty years old. There are twenty-nine years and three-hundred-sixty-four days that come before the thirtieth year of life begins, but he has only just become aware of his age.
That's not to say he's forgotten all the months that came before, but living through them doesn't mean one is aware of the journey. Time simply struck him like a fly up his nose; he sneezed, and there it was. A lifetime behind him, memories preserved in the window that showed him what was.

He is thirty years old, and he wonders if the rest of his life will pass as quickly, if one day he will blink himself to his deathbed and wonder what happened to him, mourning the years he was never truly aware of. He wishes he could have more time to live, all the time in the world to do anything he wants. He wishes he could live to witness the end of time, so he could say "I've done everything" and die without regrets. He wishes he could never die.

He is thirty years old, old enough to know it's just a flight of fancy. After all, no one can live forever. They can't even try. The Earth is millions of years old, a man can live for seventy, maybe a hundred if he's very lucky and in very good health. Every time the planet blinks, an empire falls. What is a human's life, in comparison? The flutter of an eyelash?

He is fifty years old. He doesn't remember the last twenty years as clearly as he wishes. He isn't even certain that he's fifty. He looks just as he did twenty years before, but he can't be. His friends have aged so much...Why hasn't he?
Hasn't he?
It doesn't really matter, he thinks. If he can stay young-looking until he dies, that's fine with him. If his friends make jokes about Dorian Gray, even better, though he reminds them that there are no magical portraits of him hidden in locked rooms.

He is seventy years old, he thinks. His friends are getting old, and he is still young. The world looks completely different from what he grew up in, but not for long. His memories are fading, as if he's resetting, forgetting that a life before "this" even existed.

He is very old. He knows he shouldn't be alive, but he doesn't understand why. Every time he sees his face, his forever unchanging face, he wonders if he only dreamed that he lived in a time before. Years run together in his memories, a hazy mess of semi-lucid dreams and things out of a fantasy. Yet when he looks around, it all makes sense somehow. Plants grow from between rocks and all around large metal structures, relics from an empire decades behind him. He is alone, except for the animals that rule this green-and-gray world, and he wonders briefly if there was ever anyone aside from him. He feels as though he'd simply awakened one morning and existed.

The world is changing. He is aware of it as surely as he is aware of himself, though he wonders just how aware he is of himself. The air feels different, the morning light feels off. He looks to the sun, shielding his eyes from the light, and he smiles.

The sun is dying, and he knows that his time is coming to an end.

He is dying. He feels lost, as though his existence has ultimately meant nothing to the world. Countless years behind him, and he can't remember anything significant about them. No details catch his attention; it's nothing but a flash of silver, then green as far as his eye can see, and a small speck of dust that was him standing in the middle of it all.