Modern Methuselah
by: mg
I'm in the middle of what most people would run away screaming from. And my whole life has been like that, in a way. When people would gasp in horror, I'd stand there wondering, how could I get there in the middle of the chaos and surround myself in the nightmare.
There had to be someway that I could fall flat on my face forever.
But no. When I tried to run after a man with a gun, the bullets pierced through my body and my heart rate stayed as constant as the drummer in a marching band. When I chased the suicidal man down the side of a building, sure, my body hit the floor, but I didn't have a scratch on me.
I am immortal and I want to die. Just once. I want to experience what every mortal will experience. There doesn't even have to be an afterlife. I just want out of this world. Even if I'll only realize it for a split second.
My entire life is like a blind hawk. The dreams and discoveries of a comatose child. Like the paralyzed man who just won the lottery. Or the music collection of a deaf person.
If there is no end to my life, can I call it an "entire life"?
Perhaps the biggest burden that comes with immortality is the fact that I can never use the excuse that I don't have enough time. And forget about the "life is short" slogan.
I've lost count of how long I've been alive. Somewhere around the period of the Gold Rush, I quit keeping track of the years.
Call me a modern Methuselah.
The advantage to my condition is that I'm probably as immune to change as they come. Fashion changes about every four years, so I must've bought myself new wardrobes over 100 times. In fact, if you dig deeply into the bowels of my walk-in closet, you'll probably find stuff from the Renaissance era. Call me old-fashioned.
One thing that's kept constant throughout my life, besides my heartbeat, is my fish tank. There are 16 fish in the tank, and once one dies, I replace it with another.
They swim around their stupid little glass house, passing underneath these stupid rocks and through the stupid plastic plants, mouthing the letter O as their stupid heart beats down to the last second of their stupid and empty little lives. Stupid fish. It hurts to admit that I'm jealous.
What I would give to have the lifespan of a housefly.
It's safe to say that in my life, I've never had a love-interest. I suppose it's scary for me to know that you're living a life so much more powerful than love itself that you outlive it.
It's difficult to have the knowledge that once her 70 years is up, you'll be all alone again and have to go hunting for another soul mate. So I suppose I just never even tried, because I knew that I could not deal with the death of a partner more than once. And the hardest thing is that you would have to live with that depression. You couldn't even kill yourself.
Then if I had children with that partner, I'd outlive even them, and their kids, and so on. And I'd have to deal with so much death, that I just couldn't imagine myself handling it.
So I never even tried.
The first time I realized that I was immortal was a long, long time ago, when people still had to hunt to survive. I was among the best of the hunters in my group, and we were extremely short of food to last us for the winter. I had already brought home the bacon with four bears and six fox. That would last us about three weeks. They wanted one more bear, so I volunteered, but chose not to go with a partner. An hour later, I found myself on the ground with the bear's teeth dripping saliva onto my trembling face, its claws pressing me down against the ground, piercing through my chest like a spear through French paper.
One of the group members heard my cries, and slung a razor-sharp rock into the bear's eye. The bear ran off, but still, I was lying there on the ground with so much blood surrounding me it made you wonder how the red fluid sustained life.
Of course, I survived somehow, and became a legend in my group. When I outlived everyone in my group, and ended up outliving my own legend, I knew something was different about me. Everyone around me would die, except myself, and I'd survive the most horrific of accidents, while the mother and her children across the street would die from a minor car accident or from a gunshot wound to the leg.
It's funny, because my current doctor says that I'm clincally addicted to sleep. Maybe it's because I'm tired of living, and sleep is the closest thing to death that I have. It's the only escape I have from the world, the only time I know that I'll be unconscious.
It also makes you wonder: can you dream of what Heaven is like? And if so, why would you wake up from that dream? Why does anyone wake up from good dreams? They're just as good as if they were reality. You have control over everything, so the entire world is what you want. Perhaps we're all dreaming right now, and we're only truly awake after we die.
What would happen if I became comatose? I'd lie in the hospital bed forever, outliving even time itself. I couldn't even get someone to Kevork me into the next lifetime, and my existence would be as pointless as a non-stick Band-Aid.
Oh, I don't know anymore. My entire life is just one big repeating cliche.
Oh yeah, and karma, what a great concept that is. Not that I'll ever get to see how my good deeds will affect me in the next life.
Contemplating death is a strange thing, because it makes you think: if some people are too young to die, is there someone else that is too old to die? I don't know. Humans are the only species able to forsee death. To some it's a burden, to others, it's a gift.
Call me negative, but I confess I have my own fantasy of death, the fantasy of being diagnosed with some sort of fatal disease. I didn't even have to actually die. I just wanted some sort of official time limit to my life. Some sort of sense of my life span. I just wanted to take a short nap on my death bed.
Perhaps you can sense it in the tone of my voice, that this is the most frustrating time period I've ever lived in.
It's because I'm surrounded by life. I have enough of that. I don't need more.
There's the robotics engineer who's intent on building the first robot who accurately mimics human movement and behavior.
Age-defying toothpaste actually exists in stores.
Don't even get me started on cloning.
So much life, so much death, and everyone will experience both, except me.
~~
"If destruction is a form of creation, then I guess my sadness is my way of making room for happiness," I tell my fish. "Isn't that right, Rupert?"
I bend over slightly and peer into their little glass world.
"And my good deeds are like life: rarely appreciated," I say to them. I scatter their little flakey food across the surface of the water, and they silently shuffle and nibble at the tiny bits of food.
I pick up the little fish bowl and place it near the window outlooking the view. "See that?" I point to the sky while the fish aimlessly wander about their plastic rocks and mechanical scuba divers. "That's the sky, and it's the only thing in this world I can think of that is so beautiful when it's completely empty."
I turn away from the fish and switch on my television, and find a group of male camels gang-raping a female and trying to kill her child to eliminate future competition. The amazing part comes when the baby camel, whom the producers took the liberty of naming "Mizu", survives and returns in a few years to challenge the very same group for leadership and wins. Now the question I'm asking is, will Mizu ever force a female to have sex with him? Will he kill off a baby camel to eliminate future competition?
In a world as ironic as mine, you'd think the person that coined the phrase, "the mind is a terrible thing to waste" probably shot himself in the head.
And when life becomes too good to be true, I'd bet on the possibility that you're asleep and dreaming.
I've learned many things about human nature, and one of them is that we are all in desperate need of another gender. Males treat females like garbage, females swear they don't need males, and bisexuals are just plain greedy.
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©2001 mg
