prompt: fine, title: it's been a long long time in misc. flash fiction

The worst part about being functionally-immortal is watching people you loved age to death and places you cherished crumble to dust, sure. That sort of trauma never erases your humanity, soul or ability to feel pain, much as you want it to. Hurts just as much every single time. Losses from decades or centuries past do eventually fade into pale pink scars, yes, but every new one hurts as much as the last and takes just as long to slip away from the terrible sting into a dull distant ache. That’s all pretty obvious human stuff, though. Relatable. The pain of mortality on a longer scale.

The weirdest and most confounding downsides to the chronoturgical lifestyle, however, are the times I need sit and pretend to accept the myriad ways that history’s been misremembered, just because it’d sound insane telling someone “look, you are wrong, I was there”. Whether it is via intentional propagandas, the massive sudden loss of an information store like their Alexandrian library or even the slow memetic mutations of damaged chains of human memory, our histories get a bit more wrong with every generation’s death. Thing is, death is something I sort of don’t do, so I remember how it all went down. But if you misconstrue the past, I certainly cannot say
“this is what my eyes saw, this is what my ears heard” because I look roughly thirty-five, even though I’ve looked that way for the last fourteen thousand years, give or take. I was born in the glaciers’ time and, though I’ve never learned how or why, I was cursed to watch them slide off into nothing and witness what the privileged call “civilization” rise up in their dampened wake.

So, when someone complains that someone who doesn’t look British gets cast in a Shakespeare adaptation, I can’t tell them how that era was a lot more ethnically diverse than racist structures care to admit, because they’ll laugh and claim I’m joking or crazy when I say “I was there”. Or how the Mesopotamian city-state of Uruk had largely equal rights for women until Earth’s first real-estate developer declared himself king and overturned the laws to his whim. All the things many folks believe “the natural order of man” just idiotic quirks of history, errors remembered randomly over truths or, indeed, other errors similarly forgotten, happy and unhappy accidents.

For the first few millennia I definitely felt this was a curse, just seeing everyone I’d ever know fading away. After the rise of cities and states, I thought of this as my blessing for another few thousand years, seeing myself as a scribe who could tell this entire human story uninterrupted, allowing all peoples the wisdom of ages forever. But having realized how few would or could ever believe me, I’ve come to see it neutrally, neither blessing for all or curse for me. It’s fine. It’s just a thing, it’s just another strange random thing. Just like everything else I’ve ever seen.

Last updated June 13, 2024