Institute History
Description
Zoya Lowe, a 53 year old woman living in Miami, Florida, has been diagnosed with a mysterious terminal illness and given one week to live.
But Zoya Lowe has also been given the ability to travel back in time. And she’s been using it to relive the final week of her life over and over and over again. In fact, she’s been doing it for so long she can’t remember when it started or how long it’s been. But every week is always the same. Wake up in the hospital. Go home. Be with her family. Go to the office. Update her will. Visit her mother. Celebrate her birthday. It never changes. Week after week after week after week.
Then, suddenly, during one of these week-long repetitive loops, Zoya meets a young woman whom she’s never seen before: Paula Campos: a 27-year-old Brazilian-American living in Miami with a lackluster job and vibrant energy. Zoya decides that there must be a reason why this woman, this anomaly, was placed in her path. She quickly realizes that they have a lot in common and decides, for the first time in her life, that she is going to do something entirely different. She’s going to do whatever she wants to do. She's going to actually accomplish the things she had given up on long ago. She's going to finally become the person she always dreamed she would be.
But changing isn't always easy. And right on time, after five days Zoya’s nose starts bleeding, the sign that she is about to die. And she has to go back again. And wake up back in the hospital, as though that final week never happened. No matter what she did or what she accomplished, she always goes back. And no one else will ever remember any of those experiences, but her.
Eventually, the loneliness of it all starts to get to her. She’s stricken with guilt every time she leaves her family. Further, she realizes that she can’t relive an entire lifetime in just one short week, no matter how many times she travels back. Suddenly she’s like everyone else, struggling to figure out what gives life meaning, wondering if she can become the person she always wanted to be, and hoping she can do the things she always longed to do.