Immortalised.

It is said, that at some point in their career, all true artists must confront their demon. Whether or not I belong to that small group is for others to say, nevertheless, the confrontation came. I vaguely recall it being a small, off-putting creature, with glossy serpentine skin and an array of eyes like that of a devious spider. I had not been expecting it, awaking to find it perched on my chest, sniffing my face. A vile little gargoyle with a startling voice. It was quite the sophisticate and it wasn’t long before we were negotiating a contract. My desire was plain, Immortality, but I knew demons were cunning and so I stated my provisos. No harm was ever to come to me, I would live forever, I would not age past the age I was, which was thirty eight years. The creature took the deal.

I did not tell my dear wife, nor my children, of my dark pact. I suffered to watch them grow old, to die. While these were dismal moments, I just took it as a lesson not to get close to others. A rule I broke too often, with similar heartbreaking results. Other people did not last. Nor, it seemed, did Empires. I bore witness to the fall of one golden age after another, the long slow dredge through various dark ages. I saw the wars, walked the bloody and burning aftermaths of battlefields and razed towns. I saw them grow away from and closer to their gods, with all the vicious ramifications of both. And in the end, I watched them fall, commit acts of unspeakable arrogance and turn their civilisations into rubble, burnt meat and ash. After five thousand three hundred years I was alone on a sick and burning world.

Despair is not a rich enough word to describe what that felt like, being the only person left. I wandered that brutalised planet, sifted through the ruins of my species hoping to find someone but there was no one. I was alone. It took me almost a decade to come to terms with that.

The plant life came back, took over the ashen memorials of an extinct race until nothing of them was left, nothing but me. Slowly, animals returned, insects and birds at first but lizards and rodents were not far behind. I watched ten thousand years pass, lived with a large dog pack for several hundred of them. I watched the evolution of them in real time, but it was clear they were making the same mistakes as humans, primitive though they were. They died from a plague around the same time they figured out how to farm cows. They lasted about twenty thousand years. After which things stayed pretty much the same until the comet hit the planet half a million years later. The weather changed over-night, earthquakes and forest fires were common. Half a continent was gone along with almost all life. It felt familiar, as did the long rise of plants and the return of animals. It remained like this for the following twelve million years, a circle of of nothingness, punctuated by moments of existence. Species rose in dominance and fell, always tragically and spectacularly.

One day, something happened to the sun. It expanded rapidly, engulfing all three inner planets in it’s super-hot, blue-white halo. The light eroded all existence of Earth, all, except for me.

It is impossible to say how long I dwelt there. It was almost as impossible to endure. The burning radiation was powerful enough to obliterate me instantly had I not demanded no harm ever come to me. Nevertheless I was trapped inside it. It was the boredom that was the most intolerable part of that long uncomfortable existence. Yet I could not be harmed, even mentally, and so I did not lose my mind nor my reason to the tedium. It was a billion years of blinding, brilliant inconsequentiality.

In the end it exploded, propelling me out into the void. Having spent so much time in the Sun, I could no longer think as I had. Everything had been like swimming through bright blue concrete for so long that when I regained some of my wits to find myself whizzing through space, fired outwards, away from the galaxy I called home, into the expanse between it and our neighbours.

That gulf would have driven anyone else mad, but not me. So, I had to travel awake, aware, unable to recognise time apart from measuring the distance between myself and the next visible object. If despair is not rich enough to describe watching the extinction of mankind, it is an insult to use as a description for my state during that unending expanse. I’d weep and watch my tears freeze in my eyes, I’d scream and shout but there was no air in my lungs nor as a medium for my noises to travel. I was imprisoned by my own body, trapped by constant motion and void. I still lived. I still secreted sweat and tears and somehow urine and faeces. Given the time-scale, this formed a vast, hardened icy crust around me. I was buried inside a rock of my own making, a comet, blazing around the universe. Where as before I had the infinite empty blackness of the void to experience, now I could experience nothing. I wanted to die.

This, of course, had been a common desire of mine, through most of my past. Yet each time I petitioned the demon to hold up his end of the bargain now that I was finished with life, but the creature never came back. Not once, in all the millions upon millions of times I called for it, did I even get a hint of it. It did not want my soul, nothing Hell could have done to me would have been any worse than this infinite tedious pointlessness.

And then the stars began to die. I was a body floating through space again, having flown too close to a sun. The rock rained from me like ash. I stared out watching the lights go out across the immeasurable canopy of space-time. All faded into nothing. After that, all there was, was me, only me. There was no sense of time passing, no sense of distance, or movement, no colour, no darkness, just my awareness being aware of itself. There was no interior or exterior, just the beating of my heart in my ears and my imaginings which burst into dizzying shows of energy, sculpted memories, haphazard, remote.

The End. Forever and Ever, Amen.

Alone.

Alone.

It felt no different from my preceding existence, though lack of dimension was claustrophobic. My mind, having little else to do put an end to The End. An explosion, a liberation, a firework display to celebrate the oncoming morning of reality. There was a torment of anticipation waiting for that first sunrise. There it was, a twinkle; there, another.

Time returned, along with distance, and scale. The vast star-scape of the universe once again came into existence. Huge washes of swirling galactic brilliance, circled around and around. My brain, having been taught to endure nothingness for so long had changed its relationship to time and so I watched this all happen in breathtaking moments. Beneath my very feet a planet grew around me in what felt like days.

It was still a while before life took hold. It is hard to explain how fleeting it was, from the oceanic soup through to trees and dinosaurs and rodents and insects and reptiles and man. I had been alive so long that the horror of this was the worst of all.

Once again I would watch a world grow and die and so that is exactly what I did. Everything proceeded as our best guesses tell us. Great lizards that died out from disease and then went extinct completely after a meteorite devastated the globe. I devised a plan when I spotted the first men. They were camped out by the edge of the river, naked, upright, carrying long sticks and rocks. I walked from the woods out onto the other bank. They spotted me, wide eyed with shock. I wondered if they even recognised me as human. I had half a billion years in which to make clothing for myself, to smelt a blade, to learn to live well. And I thought it my duty to help my own fledgling species thrive. I suppose it was inevitable some of them thought me a god. It was a bad idea. They lasted less than twelve thousand years before they wiped each other out again.

Alone.

At this point I have lost count how many times I have watched the universe die and be reborn, to watch Earth grow and be swallowed by the sun, to watch my people rise and then destroy themselves. It is meaningless, a tiny blip amongst countless stars all of which are also destined to fizzle out, to be replaced by endless nothing punctuated by an existence almost imperceptibly quick in comparison. Though it is unfair to call it nothing, when I exist within it, alone.

At the beginning of this tale I made the suggestion that once, I had been an artist that had sold his soul to a demon in order for immortality. It could be true, several times I have been an artist and I have on occasion made deals with those powers that lurk in the spaces between worlds, but I cannot swear by it. I cannot recall most of the names I lived by, nor the names of the towns I lived in. There have been so many, did I have a family that first time? Was there even a first time or have I always been going round and round?

I have lost so much of my past that memory is a noisy collage of similar moments jumbled together; patchy and repetitive as if endlessly reflected between two mirrors. And I write this now, I suspect I have written these words or similar words, countless times before. It is pointless, there is no one who can help me, even when someone does believe me, there is nothing to be done. I am alone, alive forever and ever without end, past the end of the universe and through the endless moment before the birth of the next. On and on and on.

Forever and ever, Amen.