The Man Who Hid From Death

Part 1 - “Who am I?”

A good question, a very, very good question. But one best left unanswered.
In short; I am nobody. You may refer to me as Tom, or Sam, or Tabitha or Johnson or Louis, and in any case you will be right, and I will acknowledge you and be that Ben, or that Simon that you were looking to talk to, but that is not who I am. Some days I am a spy agent. Others a tech CEO, looking for the next big thing, and other days I am homeless, begging for food on the street. This last one fits me best, because it is the closest. As such it is the one I avoid - helplessly - as it is best not to upset the rules of the fantasy. Truth is best kept away from. 

I am nobody.
These are sour words, formed in destitute and desperate times. They sting in my mouth, the taste of age and decay, of weak bones and frail body. Words like these sit in the back of throats, attacking at heavy hearts, waiting patiently to be spoken. They are thebackground noise of my existence, the words that I never heard or thought, words that I never knew but instead felt.

So here, before I leave - this is me, I am Nobody.

And now, the question changes. Who am I?

I am young, free and boundless, and I am old, older than the deepest sea and the faintest star. I am rich, I am poor. Black as ink, white as parchment. I am anything and everything you could possibly be, and yet I am none of these things. They are my reality, but not who I am. 

I wish that I could say that there was something behind my eyes, down underneath my skin, a soul or substance, something to ground me. But beneath my feet, floorboards break and grow moss. They die. I am, in a way, dead. Because sometimes, I wonder if there is any real ‘I’ to me anymore. Beneath the skin and tissue, woven far down beneath the layers of muscle and fat, gristle and bone, somewhere in my slow and aching heart there was an ‘I’, somebody to be. 

But now I think that is dead. Starved, locked away in a cage, isolated and lost, it has died. I have died. I am dead. Somehow that phrase hurts less than the other. 

You might be wondering what I look like. I wonder the same thing. Because when I look in the mirror, I see hundreds and thousands, even millions, of people. Faces, names, places, colours tastes, ideas, pains, pleasures. People. I am constantly shifting - skin deep, a caricature of rough estimation, the idea of a person. The only real consistency with these fantasies, the only truth to my lie, is death. It is in all of them. But death is not simply the body-decay, oh no. 

Death is in the act of being forgotten, death is delivered only when the idea of you, when your ‘I’ is lost to the wind. That is true death. I am going to cheat death. He will not be able to find me; for I am hidden. I will be immortalised, a god. I am the memory of humanity, the thoughts of every generation, the will of every individual - and I will never, ever die.

Interlude - entropy

The universe dies quiet, and the world goes out with a whimper.

From life to death, From empire to collapse. From lovers to the lonely. 

It is the fundamental force of nature - things will break down, eventually. 

Eventually, we will all return to dust. 

Rivers flow strong, mountains stretch against the horizon and valleys cut deep swathes into the earth. This world we inhabit has known life long before we came to find it - and so we take it for granted. How could something of such scale, of such unimaginable and infinite magnitude decay? And maybe there is some truth in that statement - these lands will exist long after the waves of humanity disappear. But even the rivers will stop their flow, one day.

The mountains will crumble, the valleys will widen. The other species, too, will die out.
Where there was once trees and deep forest will lie old and decaying corpses of wood and stumps, where there were animals now will lie skulls. 

The lands will be dry and empty, the seasons will blow on without cause or consequence.

There will be a great, heaving silence that drapes itself over everywhere. A silence of neither peace nor tension, a silence to make nothing, really. In great deserts and grassless fields, nothing will move but the clouds, and the lapping of the tides.

It would be a silence to make dogs howl like wolves, and to turn men into animals of insanity’s predation. The death of a home. 

Eventually, even the sun would burn out, it’s light faded wordlessly, like a lightbulb cut of its power. There would be no bang, no explosion, no fiery inferno to end on an exciting note. 

It would simply fade - along with the rest of the universe. 

And then, even the clouds would not move. Without a sun, the earth would depart on a journey from nowhere - to nothing. The light would slowly sink from the skies, as if pulled apart from the earth like a fragile veil. As those last pinkish-reddish hues departed, the earth will sink into a cold, lightless, soundless singularity.

From above, the only light would be of other stars. And millions upon millions of years, those stars would slowly fade too, the sky taking on a darker and darker black, an inkblot slowly spreading across the universe. The moon would drift away, too. 

And then finally it would arrive at that nothingness point, where a dead world would finally lay still, and empty oceans became reflections, reflections of an infinite blackness.

Part 2 - Ignition

The first thing that I felt was the overwhelming feeling that I should not be alive. Not, however, in the way that he was glad to be so. It was a sinking feeling in my stomach, like the gravitas of my own body was trying to sink me back down into the ground. It was my skin but it did not feel like it was my own, an impersonator trapped in someone else.
It felt like he had woken up from a deep, deep sleep, a pure oblivion. Something was off balance, something was so terribly, terribly wrong about this place. And yet, there he was still, in the middle of it all. And then he stood up.

He was on a beach, one he had never seen the likes of before. All around him, sandy dunes carried on for miles, interspersed with driftwood and rocks, scattered like gravel kicked onto pavement. Behind him the beach continued in the same way for many miles more, eventually leading into a crescendo of large, overbearing mountaintops. There was no clouds, no sun to be seen, and yet the world was lit up as if on a grey and stormy day. A light that seemed to emanate from nowhere, an anomaly. But what was worse was above, where a black sky sat without question or comment, as if there was anything somehow normal about it’s terrifying exposition. The darkness of it, the starless, lightless stature it held made it feel as if the world itself was pressing down on my skull, a close veil about to collapse over me. That was an empty sky, and I could feel its expansion, feel its pull away from me, from whatever this was. And in front of me, of course, was the sea. Well, I could only guess that it was the sea. Perfectly still, it reflected the sky’s hues invisible nothingness. It looked like the world simply just ended at that point, a thin disc that lead off into the dark. And so, of course, I walked towards it, until my toes were just at it’s edge. Peeking over, I saw no reflection - but what I did feel was a pull, a gravity towards the dark. It was calling for me. I looked around, saw this pseudo - world, and knew that this was only going to be the first of many. One last deep, slow breath and I jumped into the abyss.