First Draft Created: 06 Jan, 2025 18:30
Last Updated: 06 Jan, 2025 22:44
"It was a green day in the pasture."
Those were the first words they wrote, then set aside their notebook and pencil and contemplated just how long it had been since they'd last written anything. It wasn't even a good writing pencil anyway, a 2H, meant more for drawing, in their opinion.
How do you describe a day as "green"? Or, were they, in fact, simply being influenced by the colour of the abundant nature around them?
It was no use, they simply weren't used to writing, and they weren't in the mood to write whatever they were supposed to. Boredom and loneliness had led them to other pastimes, such as reattempting pencil line art, and now, writing.
"Good? Good writing?" What even WAS good?
They shivered, then became aware of the icicle forming on the tip of their nose. They had been out there too long. It was winter now. The green of the pastureland had given way to blistering snow and ice, and their ears were likely frostbitten - they could certainly not feel them now.
They recalled those desert days, looking out at the Great Pyramid in egypt, watching the sands rise and fall, reshape into dunes as the days and years passed, as people gathered to attempt to get the desert's natural erosion under control for the sake of the tourists.
Life was certainly no salsa dance, any more than it was a picnic.
It was easy, easy to wait out here far too long, to become part of the scenery, the picture, the nature.
To become part of the earth.
Humans and their short lives. To die so young as a human seemed ... Fortuous? Fortuitous? He wasn't sure of the word.
Also, now he had become he again. Time took its toll and sometimes, and if you were one such as him you found yourself developing and separating new identities after so many centuries of change, when you were no longer even sure you were you anymore.
At times, certain genders of yourself were easier to express than others. Such it was with the changing of society over millenia, and shifting ideas and cultures around gender norms themselves.
He'd had a lover once, he had met her by a tree in their now-favourite park. As her fingers caressed the trunk, they'd found their way into his, while they'd stood, talking, for what felt like ages. For what had been ages, in human time. Centuries. They'd returned many times, every few milennia, to that same park, to grow silently with the trees.
Random though their chance encounter had seemed, and the prolonged conversation that had come of it as they'd stood for centuries watching the same tree, commenting on its growth and scarring, the noises it made at a frequency too low for human ears to hear, it was not random. He believed that fate was far more than blind chance. Perhaps it was more destiny.
Destiny. That was the word she'd echoed when their hands had moved across the same patch of bark, when her fingers had brushed his and he'd finally taken and held her hand, when their eyes had met, and they'd stood still for ten more years - a blink of an eye - as humans whirled past them and the sky lights of night and day whipped at near-lightning speed through the sky...
Humans always so busy... How did they move so fast? How did they not burn out, wear out and whither away instantly?
Well, he supposed, they did.
"Destiny" she'd breathed, as her eyes finally left his, and he'd nodded his head.
When you spent that much time beside someone you'd just met, feeling the equivalent of what humans would call a full day, holding their hand and saying not a word, that word was all you needed.
Ecstasy was what he'd felt, holding her hand.
Finally.
Someone.
Someone whose hand he could hold who truly understood.
Humans, always in a rush.
The world, always in a rush.
But not she.
And after they'd left the park that day, they'd stayed.
Year after year, millenium after millenium, together.
She was gone now, and had been gone so long.
A full five years, which had somehow become a lifetime, as he was suddenly back to near-human time without her. Or perhaps longer.
It felt like two centuries.
Time had never slowed for him before he'd met her.
Now, it was glacial, except when he had a rare, full moment to himself to recall her, to become lost in memory.
Then, a whole season could pass, like now.
Though the time they took together was endless and slow compared to humans, it was over too soon.
A full half-decade since he'd lost her....
"Excuse me?"
Oh no. A human interruption.
"What is it?" His tired voice, almost too imperceptively low for the young woman's - his employer's daughter's - ears, reluctantly answered.
Had he sat here outside on the porch too long? They had grown accustomed to his habit of sitting without coming inside, without needing to rest.
Was he disturbing guests? Would he be asked to move?
He'd thought being a part-time farmhand would afford him more time to take long breaks in his off-time, to stare off into space and memory without the bustle of the city, become once again lost in his thoughts and the time that they took.
"There's someone here to see you. A woman."
She stepped back inside through the now-opened doorway, stepped aside, out of sight.
And right then, there she was again, manifesting through the doorway even he stood and turned to face her.
His soulmate.
His lover.
His...
"Destiny" she breathed.
"You found me." He murmered, and both their hands outstretched, their fingers immediately intertwining.
She smiled.
"You thought plunging beneath the surface of white water rapids would keep me away from you?"
"You were held down there for a long time when the boat capsised," he reminded, unable to stop himself smiling at her tenacity. "They wouldn't even let me stay near at the end, when they went to retrieve your... you."
"At least you came to our meeting place to wait," she said.
"I waited, yes. I'll always wait for you. I knew you'd come back, even though I couldn't reach you, even though I missed you so terribly that time slowed down. But I knew. We're immortals, remember?"
Timelessness once had seemed lonely before he'd met her, but it did have its perks.
"You know we're only human," she said.
She liked to live wild, as if life were temporary, to pretend that the stakes were high. She could never admit that the stakes didn't apply to them. She chose to claim that she simply had more lives than a cat, and that that saying itself was only metaphorical. Perhaps she even believed it.
He, on the other hand was as stubborn as a donkey, the one ever-clinging to reality.
They truly were a pair.
Her eyes took on a quizzical look as he merely smiled in return, knowing that his own eyes had taken on that faraway look they always got when all he could think of was her, and what it felt like just to be with her.
Her head tilted to the side.
"You do know we're only human... Right?" She asked, again.
"Let's pretend," he humoured her.