The unexamined life

I'm immortal.Or at least I think I am. I would say I'm about 400 years old, so it remains to be seen whether I will  live forever or not. I'm certainly the only person I've ever known to make it past 90, never mind to 500. Don't be fooled by all those stories you've read about ageless vampires and immortal gods. Being immortal (Or living long past your peers, anyway) is unpleasant to say the least.

While I don't seem able to die, I still feel pain. Acutely. I still get hungry and if I don't get food I get hungrier and hungrier until it's unbearable. Can you imagine what it's like to go a month without any food and just waste away until you can't even move? Or to catch an infectious disease and have it eat away at you and leave you writing in pain until it finally burns out after 5 years? I don't have to imagine because I know.

I was born somewhere in Africa in the 17th century. I don't know when or where exactly as I was only a toddler when the slavers must have come to my home. Whoever my parents died on the journey but I survived and made it to the new world . I was in high demand as I was a child. I spent nearly 200 years doing slave labor and escaping before getting caught and sent to a new plantation. My hair grayed and I got a few wrinkles but this is probably due to stress rather than age.

Finally, due to the civil war I was freed and tried to make a life for myself, learning for the first time how to read and write. Unfortunately, I got Cholera and was bed ridden until my money ran out and I was turned into the streets where I starved and suffered until I finally just outlasted the virus.After that, life was easy by comparison.

I spent the twentieth century living my life. I would go to whatever job I had at that moment, spend time with my whichever wife and kids I had and do the dozen little things one does throughout each day. It was a good life and I finally found little bits of happiness.


But I didn't really age. My family and friends would grow old and die and I would have to start again. You can only do this so many times before it starts to weigh very heavily on you. Nowadays I try and spend most of my time alone since to acquire and lose friends is now more than I can bear.

Lately I have been feeling a bit under the weather so I went to my doctor for a checkup. I got the results back today.  Prostate cancer. I hope to hell they can treat it, and that I don't become weighed down beneath a mountainous tumor that just grows and grows. Immortality sucks.