Return to Extremity

Immortality is exhausting. There have been endless volumes written on the struggles of living forever, I have read many of them myself. There are many poignant themes these books touch on, but many more they miss. Yes, immortality is indeed a punishment. Yes, one becomes entirely numb to the life around them the longer they experience it. The repetitiveness and boredom are excruciating. But, what they often miss is the Sisyphean suffering.

I am not an old vampire, amassing wealth since the 17th century. I have no Transylvanian castle to sequester myself away in. Nor am I some sort of demigod with inconceivable powers. No godly parentals to hoist their otherworldly might upon my enemies. I do not even retain the luxury of living one continuous life. Instead, I am simply reborn, over, and over, and over again. Perhaps this is a curse that all suffer, I am simply misfortunate enough to remember. Every. Single. Life. Over and over again. Birth, adolescence, adulthood, decay, death. Go again. Birth, adolescence, adulthood, decay, death. Again.

I have been everything from a slimy amphibian, to a rather perturbing squawking bird, to one of the first apes to climb down from the trees and walk amidst the tall dry grass. Of course, climbing down from that lovely Baobab tree in the Miocene period was one of my greatest mistakes. If we had never evolved, perhaps I wouldn’t have suffered such as a tax broker two lives ago.

Perhaps I wouldn’t be huddled here now, balling my eyes out in the dark while I clung to a third grade teacher. I couldn’t even remember her name to tell the truth. Retaking elementary school classes had been the least of my concerns in this life. Afterall, division and multiplication had been around since my life in Babylonia. What I had not expected, nor particularly remembered, was the field trip our class was to be going on.

There were so many little details to keep track of, a trip to Mammoth Cave hardly seemed noteworthy. That was, until I saw the formidable moss laden entrance to the heart of the Earth. I was suddenly no longer a child enjoying the wonders of nature.

I kicked and screamed as I was carried, no, dragged towards the mouth of the cave. The two men beside me seemed entirely ignorant of my pleas, though I was certain they could hear me. As I nearly bit off the ear of the one closest to me, he dodged, and merely replied in a hushed tone “This is for your own good.”

The darkness was closing in around me. My teacher attempted to calm my unsteady breathing “Shh, shh, let’s get your mind off things. Just focus on listening to the water drip off the stalactites.”

The dripping of the stalactites was nothing new to me, but by no means was it calming. That familiar sound had haunted nightmares I’d grown accustomed to for years.

The drip, drip, drip of water was the only company I had through the night. Locked away in a small hut, I was utterly alone. Only the drip, drip, drip of stalactites. And the cough, cough, cough of my slowly deteriorating lungs. My body was hot and cold, and hot and cold again. The telltale signs of a fever. Even Victorian doctors would know what to do about such an ailment. Prescribe morphine or bloodletting. Anything to dull or at least distract from the pain. But no, I was alone. Without a doctor or friend in sight. My bones ached, my joints screamed, and my lungs wheezed for help. But there was no one in sight. Just a lonely, empty hut, in an even more desolate cave. I was to die here, on my own. Consumption would be the absolute end of me, slowly corrupting my body till there was nothing left but a shriveled husk of a human being. A young life extinguished. I would say I would rot forever quarantined in this cave, but I had no such luxury. For I would be reborn, only to continue to carry the pain of the rot.

There was nothing the teacher could do to keep my cries from disturbing my classmates. It wasn’t like I could explain that she had taken me back to the very place I had died several lives before. A place I swore I would never return to. Instead, my weak body just wailed and sobbed for what had transpired nearly two hundred years before its time.

It was only as the poor teacher dragged me out of the cave that my tears began to subside. Only then that my breathing calmed and my hiccups began to subside into more gradual sighs. She took me to the Mammoth Cave’s National Park Educational Corner, and showed me the detailed pictures of bats. I dried my eyes as I stared at the little creatures. In all my time spent in Mammoth Cave, I’d never seen one of the cave’s many species of bats. The Rafinesque’s Big Horn Bat, Eastern Bat, Hoary Bat, Gray Bat, Little Brown Nose Bat, and so many more. So many beautiful species flourishing where I had once perished. Perhaps one day I could come back as one of those bats. To fly free, eat little insects, nest happily in the caves that had once entombed me.

My teacher bought me a bat plushie, and I finally stopped crying. Perhaps, there was more to life than suffering. Perhaps there were bats. Perhaps there was flight and freedom. And the delicious taste of soaring little insects.

I had little thought spared to the parents I would be returning home to. Even less thought devoted to the grammatical homework that was due the next day. Every notion of my own was devoted to the future. To the hopes and prayers of one day being freed from this extraneous life. Every thought of mine was dedicated to one day flying as a little winged rat through the amber sunset skies. Or perhaps becoming an amphibian once again. To swim through the murky swamps of the Everglades. Or mayhaps to crawl through the crowded undergrowth of the thick rainforest as a miniscule millipede. Or even to stalk through the great Serengeti as a mighty lion. Anything other than the endless trap of humanity would be the life for me.