[WP] You are an immortal. A kid from down the block has a crush on you, but you refuse their advances because you don't want to see them grow old and die. One thousand years later, it turns out they've also become an immortal, and still infatuated with you.

All this dust. I can feel the invisible snow settle upon every itching naked inch of this room. I know it's in my eyes. I close them, imagining the glistening underbellies of my eyelids wiping them clean, giving the eyeballs some delusion of rebirth, a prayer of freshness. They've seen everything in here, except themselves. Pale sunlight leaks in through blackout curtains to paint a wall of a grayed room. Darkness has no fight in it. It has no mass, no energy, no time. I can feel a rare urge flash up out of the depths of some part of my mind that used to celebrate intervals of time, past and future. How long has it been? Obsolete clockwork comes to life in me, dust flying off and catching in cracks, slowing and distorting the process. One year only? It can't have been. I check the date on the calendar, for the date I had decided I would ask Julianna to the dance. It was one day before this. 11 months, 3 days. The fact I could remember shows at least maybe I'm still a human being. I grow uncomfortable and restless for the first time as I realize I've been sitting on the pillow on the floor for over 4 hours. But the flash of the "old" me vanishes and I slip into the unconsciousness of sleep.

It is strange, the parts of reality that are consistent. If I leave a pen on my desk and tilt it so that it points at exactly 45 degrees from the edge, I can wake up the next day and still see it there, at the same angle. I have done this countless times at different angles and placements. It seems impossible that I could count on such a thing, but it is so. It's all dreams, only at different levels of detail, but there's something special about life when we're "awake." Maybe it's because I'm not the only player in this game. The less real something seems to me, the more vivid it is as well. I look at the pasty, anorexic tree in the front yard and I let the lenses of my eyes relax, as if nothing was there at all between them and the sky, and the tree comes to a new life, begging to exist, vibrant and deep, truly three-dimensional. It is strange. If I come back tomorrow, I think it may still be there. It wasn't there in my dream last night. I am tugged away by a voice I wasn't prepared for.

"Hi." It's Julianna. "You're going to be at school today?"

"I suppose so."

She laughs. "You don't know for sure?"

"How can I?"

"It's just weird to say it like that. But I think I get what you mean. It's already the dance tomorrow! Last one before high school. Time slips away, doesn't it?"

"I don't know."

"I'm sorry you don't know! At least your honest." She laughs again and walks on. I don't know what pleasure she gets out of my dead responses. I feel like an old man who has seen enough, who is knowing but only knowing of my own knowing of nothing, novel in my experience but useless and irrelevant to those who haven't had it, who is condemned to seriousness, but has nothing to be serious about.

I do still go to school. It is more like going to sleep than real sleeping. I wake up after body and mind have gone through the correct motions to keep me from having an abnormal day. I do notice the sign for the dance. It reminds me, and perhaps I should go. The word "should" has so little weight to it anymore, but I allow it, though I am skeptical of myself. Maybe I just want to feel normal. What a cliche thought for the mind to conjure up. I find myself going anyway.

I slow dance with Julianna in the pale yellow lighting of a darkened gray gymnasium. I am not unhappy. I am not dead on the inside. I smile infrequently and spend most of my time questioning not only my own thoughts and actions but consciousness itself. However, I feel full of life. It's what I have. It's all I'll ever have. My eyes relax when I look at Julianna smiling in front of me, as if there was nothing in front of me, and I am flooded with the whole of her being. Waves of electricity shoot through my central nervous system and it is almost painful in how vivid I experience life, so I have to regulate it to not be physically overwhelmed. Every nerve to my fingertips feels her soft blouse and can track the curvature of her hips. She closes her eyes, and I ween off the experience until I can distance myself from her yet again and regain mastery of my being. I go home, alone. It's the only way I can. I slow down as I get to the house to look at the tree in the front yard. It's still there, and it looks just the same. It's all very strange.

No scientist will understand what I am now. What I am now is something that knows no death. There is no proof that could be classically offered. Men of science will push their microscopes ever smaller and their spacecraft ever further, but they cannot venture into the structure of my consciousness. Their outward pushing will never reach the real frontier of reality, which is inward. The human consciousness is a beach that can summon sand castles of infinite depth and complexity, which are wiped clean by the sea when they are abandoned. Like dust. I wiped mine as clean as it can come, and I am free to control myself more so than ever before. I can't tell you how. I just remember the day I was so full of suffering I went into the darkness of my closet and faced my mind as vulnerably as possible, as opposed to the opposite strategy which had failed me and most everyone else so far. From the cleanliness of my slate I create what I wish, within myself. I am not so omnipotent within myself, though, as my encounter with Julianna has proven. But I have felt death, and felt it leave me. I looked at it with my eyes open, and it disappeared. A day feels like an eternity. A year feels like a fleeting second. The world around me looks empty, but life overfills it. There is still the same tree outside. It is strange that it, too, can stay like that.

For the second time ever, I grow restless while I am sitting on my pillow. Some kind of clockwork turns in me. The thought had come. "How long has it been?" Some curiosity never dies. Apparently the habit of tallying up one's things is too human to give up entirely. The clockwork churns. I think this way again for the first time in...1000 years. A millennium. This is the kind of time interval that should make my jaw drop, but the word "should" has so little weight to it anymore. I suppose it has been a millennium. The pen I left on the desk last night is still at a 33 degree angle with the edge. It is all very strange. I hear a voice that I wasn't prepared for.

"Hi." It's Julianna. "You're still here, too."

"I suppose so."

She laughs. "You don't know for sure?"

"How can I?"

"You know I love you, right?"

Despite my strange relationship with the world, I did not lose my emotions, nor do I ignore them. 1000 years. She loves me. Despite her brevity, I take her seriously. How arrogant of me, to think I was so special, that no one else could be like me. She loves me because we know each other. And she has the wisdom to see that, more than I did, and she could laugh about it. A smile finds its way on my lips, which find their way to hers. The tree is still there. 1000 years, meaningless. Meaningless is the number. It brings us nothing. I look at her as if nothing is there, and she does the same, and for the first time we are utterly, outrageously human.

/r/WritingPrompts Thread