Regrets of an Immortal

You have lived past your Sell Buy Date. There are consequences. You cannot remember everywhere you have been, or everyone. And you still haven’t decided whether you want to go or stay. After all this time the self is a problem you cannot solve. 

You are 70. You are 140. You are 210. You are at least some multiple of 70, perhaps. You lost track a long time ago. You stopped counting when people stopped showing up for your birthdays. Maybe it’s a number you don’t really want to know.

Immortality was invented by the young because they were terrified of getting old. They were afraid of the wrinkles, the shrinkage, the loss of love, the daily anonymity. You, who were already old, had long been resigned to your condition. But somehow the treatments got out. Life almost eternal arrived in something you ate. It wasn’t something you would have ever asked for.

Just as it was when you were an infant, faces are often interchangeable. That woman on the street might have been your mother, that lady helping you up from the ground, your wife. Your daughter might be one of the hundreds pushing past you on the sidewalk, the ones who avoid looking at you, the ones who will not say hello and when confronted deny they ever knew you.

Everyone you see looks like someone who died.

All gone now. It’s the catch phrase of the day, of every day during your time of obsolescence. You are no longer able to conduct a decent conversation. You no longer understand most of their words. When did language get so far ahead of you that everything you hear sounds like gibberish?

The news is maddeningly predictable, and rarely is it worth living for. You forget what it was you once desired. You are weary of all your fresh starts. If there is a secret to life you haven’t yet found it.

You didn’t notice the changes in your body, then they arrived all at once. Your bones shrank and became hollow. On especially bad days they carry a mournful tune. Your skin either breaks or sags. No one wants to touch you anymore. Waves of deterioration come and go. Every time they recede they take away a little more of you.

Your hair thins, becomes transparent. Eventually it is like cobwebs veiling your scalp.

Instead of growing taller, you are growing shorter. If this keeps up you imagine you might become a child again, waiting for your parents to fix everything gone wrong.

Some days it seems you can see nothing, but somehow it’s the same as seeing everything. You can see the edges where water vapor dissolves in the sun-bright air.

The puddles where tiny fish grow legs and walk out onto dry land.

Shadows with no corresponding objects to have cast them.

A sudden downpour of mummified birds.

Bits of themselves people have left behind.

A man in a dark suit screaming at his hand.

You couldn’t stop yourself from retreating into solitude. A long life spent in isolation has made you strange. You are irredeemably awkward in a crowd. You never know what to say. You have become unable to ask for help even when you need it most. 

The world is no longer the best place to live. It wears you down until nothing is left but a stain upon the pavement, a series of thoughts attached to nothing but the pain of knowing.

The vague line between the past and the present grows unstable. Memories detach themselves, then reattach one to the other in different orders. You still live in that vast house you were born in, the one with too many doors. The rooms are haunted by the things you’ve not yet done, the choices not made, and the risks not taken.

In the moments between moments, you are still a child. You still can’t sleep without a light on. You still listen for the unexplainable footsteps in the night.

There are always strangers in this house, sitting in your chair, making dinner, asking you how you’ve been, reminding you to take your pills, getting in your way. But the worst part is when they leave. And they’re always leaving. Who will stay with you until the very end? 

Every few weeks you have to say goodbye to someone you’ve always known. There seems to be no reason for you to remain, and yet you do.

The phone rings all day. They’re trying to trick you into answering. Say the wrong thing and the van arrives. The driver and his henchmen muscle through your door. They take everything, and they say they will come back for you. 

You think there may be people hiding in the bushes, waiting inside the shadows. You don’t want to venture out anymore. Every time you do you lose your way home. 

You have always known there are dark forces in this world and now that you have lived long enough you have no choice but to face them.

The longer you live the more difficult you become. You regret it, and you’re always apologizing, but it cannot be helped. You can be cruel. You don’t want to be, but a long life will do that to you, with all its challenges, its drastic changes, its terrible grind. It’s the constant reminders of mortality which make you mean.

You live long enough to learn all the things you never wanted to know. Someday all this will end. Someday you will collapse into a pile of broken sticks and rubber bands. To come from nothing, but then to go to nothing? Reduced to nothing but a memory?

You understand that in the distance there is a room with a bed waiting for you. You don’t know yet how you will travel there, but you are certain you will eventually arrive.