Twisted immortality

IX - New parameters

Songkarn woke up intending to turn around but something stopped him. His fingers were laced together with Anurak's. Anurak wasn't letting go. He thought that it was by choice but as he searched for a sign of him being awake, he soon discovered that Anurak was still sound asleep.  Songkarn observed him for a short while. He didn't look relaxed even in his sleep. There was tightness around his eyes and mouth. It made him look older than his appearance would usually imply. Songkarn thought that his real age was actually seen on his face, now that he knew about him. Especially in his mannerism and his actions. It always seemed like he was arrogant. But now it didn't feel to be the case anymore. Actually, it looked a lot like knowledge of age, deep understanding of how the world really revolved. Sometimes a bit of a smart-ass. Songkarn smiled at the thought.

Well, now he had to get away from this beautiful man and go, get himself mentally prepared. He wanted to know so much more. As a fairly smart man, Songkarn needed to make a plan. Not just everything he was curious about but also there was something he was obviously supposed to know. And it didn't feel like Anurak was willing to give him that knowledge. He needed to be smart about it. If he wanted to know even a small bit of it.

Anurak woke up from his sleep and looked around the room like he could not recall how he got there. Songkarn looked at him warily from the other side of the room. He tried hard to keep his tone casual when he started talking. "Is it your first time to sleep in another man's bed?" Anurak looked like some kind of guilt trip was going on inside his head. Songkarn wasn't about to indulge him in trying to figure out how to avoid talking about his past. It probably needed some otherworldly intervention to make Anurak act like he wasn't going insane with worry and the need to protect Songkarn from God knows what.

"Can we go back to Bangkok a bit earlier? I don't want to be here anymore and it will probably take a bit to get back there today because of the traffic." Songkarn had camouflaged the request pretty nicely. Especially sleepy Anurak wouldn't get it, he was sure of it.

But the sleepiness didn't last. Anurak had a way moving through the morning as Songkarn had never seen nor heard of. It was as if he had the energy of a 20y old and the maturity of a 70y old. Songkarn knew that it was a lot more but he also knew that he just had to put Anurak age thing into his own perspective. He wouldn't be able to understand it in any other way. That was for sure.

There is almost no one in this world, who could really see the universe in someone else's perspective. It simply isn't possible. Not that people don't try all the time. As a person who had a really hard childhood and had difficulty to live as he wanted, Songkarn found that no matter how much someone told him to look how hard life was for other people in the world, it never actually worked.

For instance, when his friends would whine about this or that, there would always be one idiot, who would say, look at how the kids in Africa are starving and how whining over small matters is nothing compared to that, or something similar. Songkarn always said that no one can ever watch farther away than their own problems. So this kind of worldview seemed really pointless to him.

Similarly, Anurak will never be able to completely understand the world through Songkarn's vision just like Songkarn will never truly understand what Anurak went through.

Songkarn decided to learn anything Anurak was willing to share or whatever he was letting slip by accident. When they were driving and Anurak had nowhere to run or to pretend sleeping or try any other evasive escape routes, Songkarn started his interrogation. "How old are you really?"

"Well, I could get a couple of years mixed up. I could make a fairly good guess that about 1026-27 years have passed from my birth. Though I have a lot of memories, even I can't remember every detail of my life from the 10th century Siam."