To Be Immortal

I didn’t mean to do it. It was a huge accident. I was even going to get my vehicle’s brakes fixed while I was driving. An old man, I assume he was a hitchhiker, raced out in front of my car, apparently attempting to catch my attention and make me stop. Oh, and I tried. I tried so hard. I kept pressing the brake pedal and there was no response. I stomped on the pedal, forcing it down as hard as I could in hope that the man that so foolishly darted out in front of my car would still be alive.

By the time my car had stopped, I had that sinking feeling in my stomach. Had I just killed a man? Heat seemed to fill the space between my ears like it would when I was a child and knew I had been caught doing something wrong. A fair distance from the halted vehicle, I saw the man. His tattered clothes suggested he may’ve been homeless, and his heavy breathing only could put the idea in my head that he was in great pain. I approach him.

I ran to ask him if he was okay. A smile tugs at the corner of his lips and grows into a mad grin. He laughs, but it’s unnerving and unsettling. Blood begins to drip from his mouth as his insane cackles slowly turn to coughs. He speaks in a hoarse and rattling dying breath. “For so long, I’ve wanted this pain to end. Now it is yours.” A serene smile crept over his bloodstained face as his eyes glazed over with the vacant look of death. I shook him, trying to get him to wake up. I offered to take him to the hospital, but it’s too late. His last breath had left him. I took his dying words as the ramblings of a madman, but oh, how wrong I was. Who would I tell about this? The idea of just leaving him out there to have his bones picked clean by wild animals and vultures disturbed me.

I pulled the sleeves of my jacket over my hands as not to touch the body. Who knows? He could’ve been diseased. Whipping my cellular phone out of my pocket, I dialed 911. “Hello, 911? I found a body on the roadside. It appears to be a man in his sixties or seventies. No, I don’t know who hit it.” I really hated lying, but going to jail wasn’t on my agenda. “You need me to stay here? Okay, that’s not a problem.”

So much for that hot date at 9:00 PM. I then realized that I needed to clean your vehicle off in case there were any traces of blood on it. Fortunately, I had some of those Clorox wipes in the trunk, partially because a friend that borrowed car recently had a nasty flu that I weren’t interested in catching. Wiping off the front of the automobile (just in case), I felt relief. The police and an ambulance showed up, only to tell me that they found no body and it was most likely just a trick of the light. My eyes shifted to the location of where the man had been. I could only see one thing. A thick layer of dust was lying where he once was. Was it all just a trick?

That was impossible. I felt the car hit him. I held him in my arms as his soul faded from existence, but then a strange feeling began to come over me. I felt so alive, so awake. Everything seemed so fresh and new, and it felt like it all belonged to me. For that moment, the world was mine. No, I couldn’t let anyone know, they’d think I was insane. I took it as a rush of endorphins from the relief you felt. I only agreed with the officers, saying that I’d been watching too many scary movies or reading too many frightening books, only to laugh lightheartedly. Most of them shook their heads at me as if I were a fool and returned to their vehicles. I got back in my car and resumed getting the brakes fixed as planned.

Life continued as normal. That feeling of grandeur hadn’t left me yet, I always felt great, at least for a good while. I got married to the person of your dreams; I lived in a nice house… Everything was wonderful. The thoughts of that man were soon pushed to the back of my mind as so many good things had come to chase away the nightmares. But only years later, did I begin to notice some oddities.

The attractive person I married was slowly growing gray and haggard. I looked no different than I did on my wedding day. Years went by and I didn’t change. My spouse suggested I just had good genetics, but I knew it had to be more than that. Only then did I realize that the old man had cursed me. After I had hit him, he had crumbled to dust minutes afterward. Years continued and my spouse began to fear me. Rumors spread about me being a vampire or an immortal, but most of these things were laughed off. Others said I might’ve been the subject of some “life extension” project, and that was how I managed to afford such a nice house. Rumors circulated more and more with the passing of seasons.

My spouse left me. I went to the funeral, not looking a day older, but I was shunned by the family. People began to avoid me. I was treated as if I carried the plague. There was only one choice.

I had to move on. At this point I were making plenty of money and finding a new job wouldn’t be hard. You hopped countries multiple times and often struggled with decisions to remarry. I met so many charming people, but I didn’t want to see them deteriorate from their youthful beauty into nothing more than frail, gray husks. I wanted to keep some of them, and I did, only to know the grief to come. I kept them until they shriveled away into no more than skin and bone buried beneath the ground in caskets. I fell apart more and more. My heart would ache, only to desperately reach out for love again.

My euphoria was slowly replaced by misery and depression each day. All I loved would die. All I saw would suffer from eventual destruction. My life was a vessel filled with nothing more than despair. It had become a painful cycle. I would do everything in my power to numb the pain. I turned to drug use; I turned to prostitution and simply try to fuck away the pain. I tried to kill myself, only to realize that nothing worked. Any attempts only resulted in scars that would seal up as if they had never even been. Disease didn’t harm me. Nothing hurt me except the loss of anything I had grown to love. The only solution would be complete solitude. I locked myself away and shattered everything I could see my accursed reflection in; that ageless reflection; that godforsaken reflection…

After all of this I realized what the old man meant. He wanted to die. He wanted to end his misery. Immortality is not so glamorous after all.

But after hearing my tale, do you still want it? Do you want to go through what I have?

I believe the only thing able to kill an immortal of my nature is an act of murder.

Please, have mercy.

Please kill me.