Without End (Intro)

When you've lived for hundreds of years, it starts to feel like you've lived forever, even though you haven't.  Those around you don't know the things that you remember.  They talk like they know things, but they really don't.  And you don't want them to know just how old you are, so you simply smile and nod and go on with your day even though inside you're screaming, "You're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong."

It's strange, too, to see how many people still adhere to ideas that would be called "old-fashioned".  You lived in a time when those ideas were common place.  You've seen which ones were helpful and which ones were hurtful.  You think you have a pretty good idea of what a better world could look like.  But again, if you explicitly admitted to anyone your insights, if you tried to explain how you gleaned them, they'd lock you up for sure.  So you keep quiet about most of it, while doing what you can in subtle ways to influence those around you for the better, and you wonder how long you can go on like this, all the while knowing that you don't really have a choice.

Is eternity a blessing or a curse?  Maybe it depends on where and how you're spending it.

You used to try to find out if there were others with your... condition.  But how do you go about asking someone if they are immortal?  You certainly can't do that.  So you combed through town newspapers over the decades, trying to find people who didn't seem to age or who disappeared and then reappeared with different names but the same face fifty years later.  It didn't really work.  You assumed that anyone else like you would have behaved much like you have - frequent moves, frequent identity changes, frequent physical changes with dyes or even surgeries.  You've done your best to make yourself impossible to track, so why would you expect anything less from anyone else like you?  Even if you aren't truly one of a kind, you might as well be.

So you do the thing you've been forced to do without end - you survive.  You keep living, if that's really what this is, and you try to do what you can to make the world around you a little better in the time in which you find yourself.  What else can you do?