LITERARY | The Curse of Longevity

They once called it a gift.

They said time would make home out of me.

Instead, it made a grave that refused to close.

I did not notice it at first—how the clock began to tick to my favor, how its hands brushed past my skin like a stranger who could not recognize what I was becoming. People aged in increments; I remained in defiance. They folded into years like paper into envelopes, while I stayed unwritten.

At first, I thought it was mercy.

But how dare I be so naive? To mistake absence of ending for abundance of life.

I watched the seasons like a collector of fleeting things—how summer softened into dusk, how rain stitched lullabies into rooftops, how laughter echoed and faded in the same breath. I loved deeply, urgently, as though eternity had made me braver. But love, I learned, does not stretch the way time does. It breaks. It withers. It ends.

And I remain.

Faces I memorized became portraits, then names, then nothing at all. Voices I once knew better than my own dissolved into a silence so complete it felt like betrayal. I buried them: friends, lovers, fragments of myself—until grief no longer came in waves, but in sediment. Settling. Layering. Hardening into something I could neither carry nor cast away.

Memory became my heaviest possession.

I tried to forget. I truly did. I let names slip, let anniversaries pass unmarked, let the past rot at the edges of my mind. But forgetting is a luxury reserved for those who end. For me, everything lingers—half-remembered laughter, unfinished sentences, the exact warmth of a hand I will never hold again. Time does not heal me. It archives me.

Endlessly.

There is a particular cruelty in repetition. Cities rise and collapse like fragile thoughts. Generations are born with bright eyes and leave with tired ones. I learn their stories, pretend to belong, and then watch as the same ending writes itself again and again. Life, I’ve realized, is not a story with infinite meaning—it is a pattern. And I am condemned to recognize it.

Over and over.

There came a moment—quiet, almost forgettable—when I stopped asking why. Purpose, like love, is something that requires an ending to matter. Without it, meaning stretches thin, translucent as old paper, until it tears under the weight of its own existence.

I am not alive in the way they are.

I am just surviving.

There is no triumph in this. No victory in outlasting everything that ever made life worth living. Immortality is not a crown—it is an echo. A hollow, repeating echo that never finds a wall to return from.

If death is an ending, then it is also a kindness.

And I have been denied of it.

So I walk. Through centuries, through ruins, through names that will never remember me. I carry every version of the world that has ever existed, and none of them can carry me back.

They once called it a gift.

But a life that never ends is not a blessing.

It is a sentence.

And I will be serving it, for all eternity offers me.