Thoughts of an Eternal Youth

David was lounging sheepishly in his comfy red armchair; it was a usual activity for the old man’s evenings. His fingers were clasped in his lap, and his eyes were closed. But even though he appeared to be asleep, his mind was actually deep in thought.

The man was always thinking. Every man thinks, of course, but thinking was all that David ever did outside work. He never talked to people unless he needed to. He hardly ever watched any TV beyond the news broadcastings. Reading was a rare thing as well, though he usual went to the library at least once every few months. Entertainment or pleasures of any sort seemed non-existent in the life of David. If anything did please him, then it had to have been his own thoughts. Otherwise he probably wouldn’t have been thinking so much to begin with.

But, ironically, David’s ponderings always ended up frustrating him. His thoughts were always swirling around, forming ideas and possibilities that more often than not were useless, would blow up on themselves, or would conflict with another that was equally was strong. He dealt with the frustration daily, but he continued thinking either way. His mind was his own. He would deal with its complexities all on his own. It wasn’t like he had a time limit or anything. He had already spent forty years living like he did now. The way things were looking in his life now, he probably had forever to find the answer he desired.

David winced whenever he thought about forever. In all his conflicting ponderings, there was one thing that he was certain of: forever is the only thing that the human mind cannot contain. Yet that was not why the old man winced. What did make him uneasy, however, was the idea of a body that could contain forever with a mind that couldn‘t.

David was only a child. It was a freakish event, but a harmless one. He had simply been playing on the back yard of his mother’s house when a pain struck him at the nape of his neck and sent him falling on his face. He had first thought that someone had thrown a rock at him, so he immediately got up and glanced around for the culprit. But there was no one. He would have noticed if there was anyone else in the yard besides himself. He then looked down at the object that had hit him and was shocked to see that it was no normal rock. There was still pain in the back of his neck, a stinging sensation that felt like fire. When he went to his mom to show her the rock, she rushed him off to the hospital. Apparently that rock was some kind of meteorite, and some of it had lodged itself in his wound. He was scared to death back then, but in the end he came out well. The bits of meteor were cleaned out of his neck with no lasting damage, and all that he retained was a scar and meteorite as a keepsake.

After that was simply a long life, the typical American life. He graduated from the University of Central Florida in 2022, got a job with computers, got married, and had a few kids. Yet as time went on, something seemed odd when both his wife and his children all died of old age before he did. It was even more odd that someone who was in his eighties still appeared to be forty. His grandson, already in his seventies at the time, especially wanted to know why his own grandfather, well past one-hundred years old, looked younger than he did. It was then that they came up with the theory that the meteorite had something to do with it. At that point, David became a celebrity. “The Eternal Youth” or something along those lines. He didn’t necessarily look “young”, but compared to his literal age (which was very frightening) he looked very young indeed. His grandson arranged meetings and interviews of all sorts when he realized what David truly was. There weren’t so many of those nowadays, but scientists occasionally came by asking to examine him. Geriatricians were searching for the secret of eternal youth, apparently. He had long since given away his meteorite so that they could study it‘s secrets.

David personally didn’t think he could live forever. But that, of course, went back to the idea that the mind couldn’t contain forever. His body, however, defied his mind. He got older and older, yet his body hadn’t aged in more than a century. To many people, the idea of living forever sounded like a curse. For a long time, especially during the time he became famous, he felt the exact same way. Now his grandson was long dead, and his children and children’s children had pretty much forgotten about him. Old and out of the times as he was, he figured that all he had left to do was simply live his life normally. So forty years ago, he took up the habits that he held now. All he did was eat, sleep, and think, and that was all he ever would do.

There were so many unresolved conflicts that plagued the old man’s conscience. Not like conflicts with people, but conflicts with himself. Conflicts that were common to all people but grew over time the more you paid them attention. He wanted to solve all these inner problems on his own. He had dedicated the rest of his life to doing that. But whenever he came to a conflict he could not understand, an old doubt rose from the depths of his mind: Why did he bother? Why was he wasting his long life like this? His response was normally “I don’t know” or something like that. But tonight, something hit him. This time he did know the answer:

He was tired of living.