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IamLEAM1983
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To Enlil

Post by IamLEAM1983 »

So you're old as fuck and you're not super jaded. How does that work?
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IamLEAM1983
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Post by IamLEAM1983 »

"Correction; I was super jaded. On a long enough timeline, everyone gets bored. Us Carmilla might have what you might call superhuman empathy, but there's a point where the endless cycle of partaking in Humanity's joys, sorrows, anger, wrath or sources of dedication wears out anyone of any bloodline. Most burnouts traditionally retreat or warp their own artistic or aesthetic pursuits to crueler ends, seeing as pain and agony probably are the only mediums they haven't experimented with.

I should know; I was one of them. I've done many things I'm not proud of, in retrospect, if only to feel something. I did it for so long that when someone reminded me of the alternative, empathy had recovered some of its lustre. Now, with psychotherapists and equal opportunities for most immortals, it's gotten easier than ever to stay engaged for longer, to find worth in your lives.

There's this chestnut my first modern therapist gave me, in 1969: her office in Vienna always had two or three housecats around, and the felines just acted like they always did, just content ignoring the fact that I hadn't connected with something that led such a fleeting existence in thousands of years. She caught me distractedly petting one of them, an orange tabby, and told me that to dogs and cats, mortals are the deathless ones. They're around for five or six good years, twelve or thirteen with some support, and mortals seemingly don't change an iota from their perspective. All they know is that mortals are around, they've got love and scratches behind the ears to give - and they, themselves have attention to spare. A day is a week to them, and mortals seemingly... effortlessly glide through it all.

She smiled at me. Next time you have to interact with a mortal, she said, try petting them.

She didn't mean it literally, of course, but petting mortals is sort of my go-to metaphor for regular human interaction, now. You don't live out your lives with the knowledge that meaninglessness is central to your entire existence, you don't go through the daily grind knowing you'll have a different name and career thirty or forty years down the line. You've got one, maybe two lifelong goals, a dozen or so milestones per decade and a routine of cyclical things to aspire to - and it all grounds you to the now, whenever it doesn't make centuries look like insurmountable mountains. Either you're content living day-to-day, or you're driving yourselves mad thinking about the legacy you should leave behind, the ways in which your name or your blood might survive...

It's all very small when compared to us, but it moves you. It makes you do more than any immortal could ever hope to do. Some of us just lounge atop our piles of cash and watch the years go by, but you get out there and live, every single day. You're like cats and dogs who live moment-to-moment, free to find happiness or contentment in small, transitory things -  and maybe that's not so much worthy of contempt as it's worthy of being emulated.

A fall might kill you, a bullet might end you - but you're alive. I've had to gun down Vitellians who spent centuries lounging in their private dining rooms, working chefs down to the bone out of some futile prospect of discovering something new - but you can sit down and enjoy the current meal, if the occasion allows for it. You feel things. You'll never sleep, eat or kill your boredom away unless one of us gets to you first.

So, I've been petting you, so to speak, as best I can. I've lost the ability to live in the exact same way that you do long ago, but if I keep what I've mentioned in mind, then the haze parts, the mind sharpens, and I can see the seconds ticking away on my watch, again. I can live like you do - or as close to the way you do as I can."
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