Prologue

There comes a point where memory stops feeling personal.

It turns into history.

I can still remember my mother’s voice if I try hard enough, but I can’t always remember whether the memory belongs to me or to the story I built around it later. That happens after enough time passes. Things blur together. Wars. Cities. Faces. Songs. Eventually you stop separating what you lived from what you learned. It all settles into the same place.

Memories are just history that you personally experienced. Given enough time and distance, they stop belonging to you entirely and belong only to history.

I think I was born sometime in the early 1700s. At least that’s the version I’ve carried the longest. There are older memories sometimes. Fragments. Bad dreams. Places I can’t prove existed. Was that a book I read or a story I heard or something I did. I stopped trying to untangle them a long time ago.

People think immortality would make someone afraid of loss. That part passes earlier than you’d expect. Human beings are better at adapting than they realize. You learn to expect loss the same way you learn to expect winter. At first, it feels cruel. Then it just feels natural. You begin to expect it. Eventually loneliness stops feeling like an emotion and starts feeling like a companion. Something that sits quietly beside you while the rest of the world changes shape.

That isn’t the worst part, though.

The worst part is that after enough time, nothing really surprises you anymore.

People repeat themselves. Systems repeat themselves. Civilizations convince themselves they’re unique right before making the same mistakes as the ones that came before them. Even rebellion becomes predictable eventually. Especially rebellion.

You start seeing patterns everywhere because the patterns are everywhere.

That changes the way you experience life.

There’s a kind of magic to being human when you still believe the future might become something unexpected. Most people get to keep that feeling their entire lives. They die before the repetition becomes obvious.

I didn’t.

After a while, existence starts feeling less like a mystery and more like maintenance. Systems interacting with other systems. Inputs. Outputs. Pressure. Collapse. Recovery.

You see enough exceptions that everything becomes a rule eventually. People think in terms of outliers. Edge cases. Statistical anomalies. But live long enough and the edges start filling in too.

After a while the bell curve just looks solid.

Repeat the cycle long enough and even the beauty in life becomes familiar.

That sounds depressing. I don’t mean it that way.

Some things still matter to me.

Music matters.

Love matters.

Small moments matter more than the large ones in the end. A familiar voice from another room. Cheap beer after a show. Watching snow quietly fall on a gray and windless day. Things nobody builds monuments for.

But moments end. That’s what gives them shape.

Everything meaningful in human life is defined by the fact that it disappears.

Songs end.

People end.

Civilizations end.

I don’t.

That’s the problem.

I’m not seeking death. I don’t think I can have that in the traditional sense. Not really.

I’m trying to find the closest thing to it.

Anyway, I suppose it all started when I was a young man.

We were farmers.

My parents came to the new world on a boat.

The boat I was born on.