By: IO

From the prompt provided by Tony W: Longevity is treated as something to covet in the western culture, but what are the pitfalls of living for hundreds of years? 

The mind is a hard drive with finite memory. Even if old data is erased, and room made for new information, hardly any single byte is saved forever. That memory of sitting on the short, rippling sand between your toes is overwritten with directions to a bakery that opened in your neighborhood last month. The emotional memory of your first crush is corrupted into the remembrance of your most recent breakup, the shattering of positive feedback into the jagged edges of a new nightmare. Live long enough, and your memories change so much that you can hardly be sure events happened at all, much less to you. The woman in the black and white photograph edged with browning decay has your forehead and your nose, but until you read the description on the back, you would not have confidently claimed that she was your mother. You walk down streets you knew in your youth and nothing looks the same. The buildings and foliage lining the paths, the curvature of the roads, the names are even different. Or maybe it’s just that these are not the same streets at all. Not even the same town. You’ve forgotten how you got here, how you got to the place before here, what the place before here was called. Sometimes new memories melt into old ones, returning on the sound of a wave hitting a pier or the scent of a lavender bush. The touch of fingertips to silk brings thoughts of Venice and Hong Kong but the actual first memory of the sensation was in a Duluth thrift shop. You’ve traveled some and read a lot and now fact, fiction, and the truths of other people form a converging multiverse in the grey folds of your mind.