The Age of Adaline Monologues

A young woman, born at the turn of the 20th century, is rendered ageless after an accident. After many solitary years, she meets a man who complicates the eternal life she has settled into.

As the years passed, Adaline credited her unchanging appearance to a combination of a healthy diet, exercise, heredity, and good luck.

Ten months after her husband's death, Adaline was driving north to her parents beach cottage where 5 year old Fleming was waiting up for her, when something highly unusual occurred, something almost magical - snow fell in Sonoma County, California. The immersion in the frigid water caused Adaline's body to go into an anoxic reflex, instantly stopping her breathing and slowing her heartbeat. Within 2 minutes, Adaline Bowman's core temperature had dropped to 87 degrees,

At 8:55 a bolt of lightning struck the vehicle discharging half a billion volts of electricity and producing 60,000 amperes of current. Its effect was threefold. First, the charge defibrillated Adaline Bowman's heart. Second, she was jolted out of her anoxic state causing her to draw her first breath in 2 minutes. Third, based on Von Lehman's principle of electron compression in deoxyribonucleic acid - which will be discovered in the year two thousand thirty-five - Adaline Bowman will henceforth be immune to the ravages of time. She will never age another day.

On December 31, 2014, a taxicab traveled through San Francisco, from Chinatown to Marin. The car carried a single passenger: a woman, her birth name Adaline Bowman, current alias Jennifer Larson. This is the first and last chapter of her story.

The moon is responsible for much of what takes place on the surface of the Earth. A stray meteor hit the Moon in 1178. The resulting concussion would cause extreme tides on every lunar phase in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. A 23% rise in the mean tide on this night produced a storm 2000 miles off the Pacific coast, causing an increase in amount of molecular ionization in the atmosphere. And for the first time in 78 years, snow fell in this part of Sonoma County.

In the first stages of hypothermia, the body will try to generate heat through shivering. When this fails, it would decrease the flow of blood to the extremities. Metabolism slows to a crawl. You're dying, but you don't know it. In the final stages… the victim only breathes once or twice a minute. A state of suspended animation.

The instant Adaline's heart was struck by the defibrillator paddles, the telomere structures in her genes regained their pliability, causing her to resume the natural course of aging. William was right after all, the comet Della C 1981, finally did return. A half century late, but as bright and magnificent as he had predicted.