Infinity

I found a little free time, so I will write something completely different. Oh yeah, as you can see I'm back to writing in English. You see, I was reading a document... that had to deal... with... hum... I don't remember. Oh yeah! It was a chapter on a book dealing with transnational business and somewhere along the lines it mentioned that somehow English had become a "standard" when dealing with international stuff. Therefore, I decided to continue in English so I can reach a wider audience...

 

Okay... maybe I'm kidding myself; it's not like I have such a bigger audience than my Ol' Three Faithful Readers.

 

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live forever?  Wake up one day and feel an astonishing vibration through your body. Little by little your eyes adjust to the new day's light as you seat by the bed's edge, dazed confused if what had happened last night was just a dream. Good or bad you did not know, but something is turning around and around in your head as you try to make up the images.

 

You give your first step towards the shower, and find your body weak and doddering; almost as if you had a hangover pulsing against your temples so hard it was as if your eyes were abour to fall off their sockets into freespace. With an air of resignation your hands cover your face, rubbing your eyes. Finally in the mirror, you almost not recognize the face staring back at you... old... rancid... decayed.

 

And then you remember the dream. An angel had come in the cover of night upon you; breathing his air into you filling your lungs with such energy you could almost feel travel in the blood of your veins reaching your heart, making it beat stronger. A sweet voice resounded in your head: "A gift," the angel said talking straight to your mind. "Infinity you shall know. Your present will become dust like the path you strode on; and your future nothing but the void that is your present." You gazed into the angel's eyes, entranced at the radiant magnificence of this being engulfed in a light that burned our eyes and yet you could see. Finally the light faded out and the angel left with a smile in its face. Yet, this smile puzzled you now as much as it had then for it had not been the smile of a father but a condescending one.

 

You laid your head to rest expecting to awaken by dawn's ealy light. Intead of the morning, eternity came. It was so fast, like a bulldozer raging your mind as people and places now filled your head, images and voices of things that were said, pictures and pages of words you had read. There was a colleague, your brother, a coach from school, a girl on a sidewalk and a man on TV. They were all dead, and here you stood infront of the mirror with your old skin clinging to weak bones. How long had it been since that fateful night? Tears rolled down you eyes along caved pathways in your cheeks made by eternal years of quietly crying.

 

Many had come and gone. You never cried anymore at funerals for you now understood the joy of eternal rest; so you just stood in the back of the room smiling and wishing, wishing one day would be your turn to give up the towel and finally lie down to sleep. Each day you make your way among people unknown back to your room alone. You sit by the window and stare into the flowing river of life in the streets. Old newspapers in the table are your sole calendar, the only vestige of the life you used to lead. A woman comes by, the daughter of someone you once knew so long ago, and she tends to you. Still, you never take your sight from the young couple across the street, the stray dog by the trash container in the alley and the mother with her children. You once had kids of your own. But now they were only dust in the wind.

 

After so many years you came to understand your curse. Eternal life. Forever you would live as a watcher to this world, recording all that had been, is, and would be. But eternal youth you did not have, and for all eternity your body would slowly grow old and deteriorate until it would carry you no more from your bed, staring emptily at the ceiling as if praying to no avail that the Powers Above to come down at you and smite your body. But the moment just before dawn, the endless universe fills your mind for infinity.

 

It is not Eternal Life that we crave, it is Eternal Youth. That energy, joy and pleasure in our souls and hearts is what makes us live forever. I have seen grown men who have such vitality in their veins that all 60-something years in their bodies reflect nothing of who they are inside. Sometimes they contain more vitality inside that many of us still young. Their bodies being but vessels not big enough to contain all that energy in their existence. It is those men who carry on forever in the memories of others.

 

And now we realize Eternal Life is a curse. Eternal Youth is a blessing we must create.