youth

04 \\ immortals

"The Devil is real. And he's not a little red man with horns and a tail. He can be beautiful. Because he's a fallen angel, and he used to be God's favorite." - Leah, American Horror Story, 'Piggy, Piggy' (2011)

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When I asked you one day what you wanted to do when we grew up you turned and looked at me, almost surprised.

“Grow up?”

“Yeah, what do you want to do when you grow up?” We’re sitting outside the cinema, feet in the road and cigarettes in our hands. Cars go by and we don’t flinch – even at the ones that ones who blare their horns at us. A while ago I would’ve been one of the people in those cars, cursing the stupid teenagers who were clearly asking to be hit. Now I was one of the teenagers living with the fear of my life being taken away at any moment.

“Aren’t we already grown up?” You answered my question with one of your own. Something I would come to be very familiar with.

“Sure, a bit. But I mean when we actually start to get jobs and everything.”

“I won’t ever grow up.” You took a drag on your cigarette and then flicked it away, the embers tumbling on the grey pavement and slowly burning out. For some reason it reminded me of us, of people. How we start out fresh from the packet and then slowly degrade as the people around us suck the souls from us. How eventually, when we are no longer any use, we are just flung away and left to burn out, alone. At least we were alight at one point.

“Sure you will.”

“I won’t. I’ll be young forever and you’ll grow old and love me still but I won’t love you anymore because the love of the young is fickle and I’ll be young forever.”

You had stumped me. Just like you did so often. You seemed to believe wholeheartedly that immortality was yours and who would I be to tell you different? So I just smoked my cigarette and flung it away, letting another life burn out alone. But you were you and that meant the subject wasn’t going to be dropped. It was going to be thrown at me when I was least expecting it and you were most expecting it.

“You don’t believe that I’ll be young forever, do you?” Now it was my turn to turn and look at you as we sat on a bench in the park at midnight.

“Well,” No, I didn’t. How could you be? You might have been the most undefiable person I had ever met but that didn’t mean you were any less mortal than the rest of us. “Not really.” And you laughed, standing up and holding out your hand to me.

“I want to show you something.” I took your hand, letting you pull me up and lead me out of the park and to a place I had never been before. I didn’t question you, I never did, and our journey there was silent, marked by the noises of the city at night. “Don’t say anything, alright, just look.”

So I promised you I wouldn’t say anything and was told off for saying something. You were like that.

The place you took me is somewhere I will never visit again. It is one of those places that you go with someone you love and then, when you think about going back without them, the concept is so lonely and desolate that you cannot see any physical way of returning. It is just an unconceivable thought that many will not understand and many others will hate to have. Because of course, a place that you went with someone you loved is a place you would want to remember. But it is a memory best left as it is. A memory that contains the person you love. For places should not be short memoirs you keep returning to but immortal beings, whose presence is not so easily forgotten.

“So, do you think I will ever be anything when I grow up?” You asked, standing on top of the brick wall and looking out at the cracked pavement and weathered walls that were the canvas for graffiti, rubbish and filth. I didn’t get it. Not the reason why you had brought me there, not yet, nor the reason why you were asking me a question when you had told me not to talk.

I was so stupid then. So idiotic to not to be able to see what you were trying to tell me. Completely infatuated with thickness that what you were trying to tell me did not make it through my skull to my brain until much, much later. You thought you were going to be immortal because there would always be someone thinking of you, even if you weren’t there. You didn’t think of the fact that eventually all who knew you would die and although stories of you would be passed on, they would slowly sink into the unswayable swathes of the forgotten. Even when I understood that though, I still didn’t realize what you meant by staying forever young. As I said, I was an imbecile.

You were never going to be immortal. No one is truly immortal. Not in reality. It was something I don’t think you ever got the grasp of; reality. You were like a child who was not yet bereaved and who had not yet been stained by the world. Yet you were the most experienced person I knew.

You were the perfect contradiction.

You weren’t going to be immortal indefinitely, nor were you going to conform to life expectancy. I knew you never conformed to anything so why did I think you would conform to this? You certainly didn’t think you would. I realize that now. I realize many things now I should have seen then.

When you showed me that place I didn’t truly know you. I don’t truly know you now but I know you better than anyone else. You are my favorite book, film, song – you are my favorite everything and I know you. I know you now.