When I began writing Brevis Vita, I wasn’t trying to tell a story about time.
I was trying to ask a quieter question:
What makes a life meaningful when there isn’t much of it?
As the story grew, I realized the answer wasn’t found in how long Ari and Briana lived — but in how deliberately they chose to live. Their world is fast, their days are brief, and yet their choices are full of intention. They do not measure life by duration. They measure it by presence.
That idea became the heart of the book.
The epilogue may surprise some readers. It widens the lens in a way that reframes everything that came before it. But that shift wasn’t written to shock. It was written to honor the question that quietly lives beneath the entire story:
Who decides the value of a life?
Sometimes the most unsettling truths are not violent. They are normalized.
Sometimes the most dangerous systems are not cruel. They are comfortable.
And sometimes the most important stories are not about changing the world — but about learning how to see it clearly.
If this story leaves you thinking, then it has done what I hoped it would do.
Thank you for walking through this world with me. And thank you for listening just as these characters learned to do.