They look so innocent. So delicate, surrounded by saltwater that is rolling and gnawing on the same rocks it churns around. The ocean roars and howls, like a hungry wolf, but over and over again, at exactly the same time, it sinks onto the sand, closes its turquoise eyes, and falls asleep.
It holds the answers. To everything on this planet, and most importantly, it knows the secrets in living and dying.
So innocent, so delicate, surrounded by saltwater.
No matter what you have heard, the line between life and death is not definite. Not like a wall, thick and hard to break, but constantly moving and volatile. It isn't actually a line; it is visible to the eye, and as hard to define as the water passage where the tide meets a river current. Standing at the shore, can anyone determine, where the river ends and the sea begins? And standing in life, can anyone determine, when exactly they start to die?
Step by step, breath by breath, everything that's living is approaching death, as if the air is toxic. When you turn 30, your cartilage loses elasticity. Your intervertebral discs go thinner, and your water levels drop; you start drying out. The lens of your eye degenerates even earlier. From 15 forward, it becomes increasingly difficult to focus.
All of this is still happening. Even without death, we're still dying bit by bit. Only the end we reach no more. We are doomed to waste away forever.
We no longer look human. Our limbs are as thin as spider legs. The faces are paler than the moon, and our skin is as dry as desert sand.
How did we get here, you wonder, and I am wondering as well, while I am sitting on the roof, listening to crashing waves that sound like cymbals up here, and watch the light bouncing off of floating sediments in the gloamy red water.
It is something in the ocean, innocent and delicate, that has brought us here, Turritopsis Dohrnii. A jellyfish, and by 2020, the only potentially immortal creature on earth. Just like ourselves, they age as well. Like ours, their cells are losing function over the years, but unlike us, they can reverse the aging process. As soon as their bodies no longer fulfil their tasks, they sink onto the quiet seabed peacefully and calmly, where they transport themselves back to the same place they once started.
What does a life consist of? It is cells that are coming to life, and it is from them it eventually escapes. Each of them has a purpose, specific and unchangeable. Once it perishes, it is forever lost. The older you get, the fewer cells are in your organs. They are losing mass, until, at they're no longer able to function. Unless you do it like the jellyfish.
On the sandy ground of the ocean, with salt water washing over them, they take away the previous function of their cells and reset them to their origin. The next time the gentle waves carry them towards the surface, they consist of undifferentiated stem cells, omnipotent units that re-specialize and, thus, enable life.
How I wish it were different!
From up here, you can only see a glass of ocean. The rest of it is overshadowed by the world that we have built around it.
It is burning. With the salt in the air, I can taste ashes on my numb tongue as I am writing this, and what I feel, as far as I can still feel anything, is hate. Hatred towards the jellyfish, so delicate, so innocent, and even though I know that it is not to blame for the burning world around me, I cannot help, but wish it had never existed.
30 years ago, I would have had a chance to rid myself of my hate; a unique opportunity to change our terrible fate. However, it was fleeting, and gone before I could reach for it. To this moment... it has been haunting me.
It was a day like every other. I was hungry, and my stomach growled at me, like an angry dog, until I answered it, and went hunting.
At the crack of dawn, I spoke a prayer, Mayan and old, which my father taught me.
hečuk tana Wohlan denn
ničimal ohow flowery ohow
ničimal ahnel flowery ahnel
sinyor ohow Mr ohow
sinyor ahnel Mr ahnel
haጓ tahk'an ta ahalal ⊄i'omole I demand
ta ahalal äilahe your precious chairs
ok' ilal lok' esbun ta awok Please give them to me
from under your hands
ok'ilal lok'esbun ta ak'o'm! Please give them to me
from under your feet
ti yahwal ana the inhabitants of your house
ti yahwal ak'ule'm the inhabitants of your home
ta a⊄i'mole your stools
ta ašilahe your chairs
k'u yepaluk un however many of them there may be
ta a⊄i'unube of your pets
ti stak' túnel that can serve
ti stak' bahinel that can be of use
skotol me ak'bun ta sni ' send them all to me
ti h ' ala' me in front of mother children's nose
skotol me ak'bun ta ščikin send them all to me in
ti hni'č'na'me front of father children's ears
hambune sni ' Open their noses to me
hambune ⊄i'kin open their ears for me
tamuk tal u may they run to earth
⊄i'oyuk tal u may they drive up
ti ta hratohe in a flash
ti ta h'ok' e in a moment
ti ta hlikele! in an instant!
I was barely six years old, when I first heard these words. Every day in the early morning my father would slip on his camouflage gear back then, put on his green gaiters, and go looking for prey. Outside the twilight would creep across the fields and linger somwhere by the deer, between the spruce trees for a while.
Accompanied by the crackling of the fire in our fireplace, his voice woke me one day. I catfooted down the creaking old stairs, and he noticed me, before he could finish his prayer.
"Sit down with me," he said, emphasized by the crackling flames, and their shadows on his face . "If you can hear it from up there, you are old enough to speak it."
He taught me everything I know.
"Thank you, brother, for giving your life, so we can survive," he would whisper, gloomy-eyed, whenever the chest of his prey would embrace his knife.
I will never forget the tears that he would shed over each and every last breath that he was responsible for.
Neither will I forget his wisdom. I remember lying next to him in the pouring rain, my dripping face buried in thick patches of moss.
It felt soft, wherever my bare skin touched it.
"It is all about marksmanship," he whispered. "In order to take the prey as quickly and ethically as we can, we need to be able to place our shots exactly where we want them, and we have to acknowledge our limitations in doing so."
He put his finger on the trigger where it remained in comfort, as if he were to rest it there.
"Partly, it is science," he added. "Another part of it is practice and the most important part of it, my son, is art."
Silence. Only the rain that was throbbing on the leaves above us, as he started aiming, both his eyes wide open, despite the tears that the sky was shedding. He drew a deep breath, exhaled about half of it, and kept it the other half in his mouth as I watched him squeeze, not pull, the trigger. Slowly, with steady pressure. A shot ripped through the fog, sharp and sonorous. When it decayed between the trees in the distance, a dull thud sounded out. The stag his shot had hit met the mossy ground.
"For a perfect shot," he said, approaching the stag, "you have to master your breathing. You relax, aim, squeeze, and squeeze some more."
For the next few years I would stick to this advice. Yet what I still had to learn was that even a perfect shot will miss its target, if you lack patience.
From when I was six years old, we would camp out in the wilderness for weeks every winter, training our endurance. Beneath snowed up sticks and leaves we would hide, starving and freezing. We would be mesmerised by silence and blinded by the world in its white wedding gown. We would hear every snowflake that was sliding onto the icy ground, and we would give up breathing for a while, scared that the inhabitants of the forrest would see our exhalations tumbling towards the sky.
At night, my father would show me the northstar and teach me to use it in order to find my way. During the day, he would show me in which ways the tracks of a debilitated deer differ from those left behind by a healthy animal. To this day, I am hunting like he used to. Nowadays, however, there is barely any prey.
When shooting a bird, we can consider ourselves lucky, because with billions of immortal people, the animal populations have long been exhausted. They are trying to persist, and are reproducing faster these days, even in the dead of winter. However, they are not immortal and won't ever suffice to satisfy the hunger of the eternal.
Nowadays we do not die if we don't eat anymore. What is happening to us if we don´t find food is worse than death itself. Our cells start consuming one another, before they reproduce themselves. It hurts.
Even though eating is no longer about survival for us, it is, thus, still mandatory for our state, physically and mentally. We might not starve without food, but we feel agonizing pain when we are hungering. Our hunger is a constrictor snake. Slowly and without a sound, it creeps up on us. At first, we barely notice its grip, but the longer it is wrapped around us, the tighter it is growing. It´s trying to crush us, until every bone in our body aches. Pain like this doesn't just go away. It cannot be forgotten about, once it has passed. It would affect our minds, until we would start losing their remnants.
Insanity looks like lost gazes on motionless faces. It sounds like empty words that are spoken, but never understood. What does it feel like to go insane, I start wondering, while I´m observing people like me, who are on a ramble for food in the gloomy streets, and is 'going' even the right word to describe it? It indicates a controlled motion on a pathway towards a certain place. Lunacy, however, isn't a place, but the opposite.
Beginning lunatics don´t find a way, but they lose it, and the more they are losing themselves in their own mind and answer only to the voices inside it, the madder they become. They are not going, but falling insane. Uncontrollably, abruptly, and as fast as a high speed train that drops off a decaying bridge.
Every five minutes. That's how frequently I witness that someone else loses his mind when I observe a crowd of people. Because humans - whether eternal or not - will never be able to endure constant agony.
Even at this very moment, whilst I´m writing this, I can witness the grip of hunger that would drive someone insane. Roughly, 30 people are standing outside the building, the roof of which I am sitting on. They are digging through debris and ashes in search of something to eat. The woman who has taken the lead, dark red hair and hungry eyes, will be the first to lose her mind.
She is staring at me. With her hands still digging, she keeps me wrapped up in her glances and violence sneaks onto her face. A groan, sudden and violent. Three, two, one: now! It is happening.
Her fingers turn white; her hand cramps around what looks to have been a bathroom sink once upon a time. She starts screaming. Jesus, she is far enough away from me, but her screams sound as close, as if she were right next to me.
I don't want to look, don't want to see it, but I am hypnotised by her voice, so clarion and high-pitched that it couldn't belong to anyone in their right mind.
It is taking its course. All the others down there start realiying it, too. Frightened, they are getting up from the ruins, raising dust and ashes.
Where are they gone?
Like in a magic trick, I cannot see them anymore. Before the dust settles, they have scattered, like a murder of crows, and the woman is on her own, misted by tumbling dirt. Her piercing screams don´t cease while she is looking at me.
Does she even see me, or is it insanity itself that is staring at me from the sockets of her eyes?
She pulls the sink up from the ground, grunting and barely strong enough to hold it. I can hear her fingernails, covered in dirt, when they scratch across the surface. Gut-wrenching. One of her nails must have broken off; is is leaving stains of blood.
I have taken my eyes off her, but the deterioration of her mind grows louder. She throws the sink that she just picked up against the wall of the neighbor-building, where it shatters. When its thousands of pieces are scattering,.it sounds like heavy summer rain.
All at once, the noises down there stop. It is dead silent. No single sound, apart from far away explosions. I want to peek down to figure out what´s happening, but I cannot bring myself to do it.
Burbling sounds. Is my mind playing tricks on me? I think I can hear running water. Even though I don't want to meet the woman´s gaze, I cautiously steal a peep down. Oh, Jesus Christ! What a mistake! The state of her hurts my eyes.
She has approached. My pounding heartbeat rises to my throat. From her hair down to her nose, her chin, and clothes, she is dripping, a the canister above her head. This stench! So aggressive that I can taste it on my tongue, barely able to breathe. Petrol. That is what she has soaking herself in.
The empty canister thunks at the window beneath me; she has thrown it away. My hands are shaking. Despite the many times I have been witnessing the process before, it gets to me every time. Because I know exactly what she will do next, something inside me tears at my innards, and tries to make me prevent it. I have tried before, but failed. On my arms, the scars to attest to it.
A flaring up match. I can hear it, and afterwards, there is a metallic stench. This is what burning people smell like.
The iron in their blood heats up and scorches. Crackling, their hair goes up in darting flames and leaves a taste of sulphur in the air.
She will keep on screaming. For the next hours, days, perhaps forever. While she is burning and shouting in agonising pain, she is standing right in front of my building. and suddenly it is like it would be with an accident. As much as I don't want to look, I cannot help but stare at her.
She must have been a pretty woman, before the eternal and the hunger and the madness ate the beauty from her face.
Did she have children?
She might have had a husband who loved her, has certainly had parents who raised her, and maybe a sister who looked just like her.
I reckon that she was a dog person. I reckong that she was loyal at some point and would have done anything for the ones she loved. Now she can´t do anything anymore. For the rest of eternity she will be on fire. Her cells will permanently reproduce and eternally feed the flames.
She will be in agonising pain forever, and a suffering like this turns lunatics into monsters. They start torturing whomever they meet, and if it is only to make them feel what they are doomed to feel. Everyone around them, even their own families, will become their victims. Everyone around them is in danger. Everyone, including me.
I will have to pack up and go. As fast as I can, because there is no point in fighting those who have fallen insane. However, even after you have left, you never forget their faces. In your mind you start making up stories about their previous lives. You fantasise about who they used to be, because every person deserves to have been someone to somebody else, it is as simple as that.
The ones who burn are the hardest to forget. Others would try to cut off their limbs and leave an ocean of blood, or rip out their eyeballs in order to devour them. No matter what they do to themselves, they regenerate faster than they can do lasting damage. Only their minds would go weaker and weaker. That's why their insanity isn't a place. It cannot be a destination; if it were, there would be an end to it. They could possibly return from it; could walk away and go somewhere else. But they cannot.
The longer they stay insane, and the weaker their minds become, the less likely they are to ever recover.
She is still staring at me. She is staring like she is begging me for help, but it is too late. Just as it was for so many before her; a few of them, amongst my closest friends. I nearly made it. i would almost have succeeded to stop the pain. 30 years ago, on my hunt in the crack of dawn, the opportunity presented itself to me, but I let it slip away, and I have been hating myself for it until this day.