In the hushed annals of eternity, where time stretches thin and meaning

dissolves like sand through an open palm, there exists a man cursed to live
forever. His name is unimportant; he has had many, discarded each as it
became a bitter reminder of who he once was. Call him the Immortal, for that
is all he is now.

At first, he thought it was a gift—the ultimate triumph over mortality. He

revelled in it, watched empires rise and fall, tasted the fruits of every epoch,
and danced beneath a thousand moons. His laughter echoed through the
halls of history, a sound untethered from the fleeting sorrows of mankind.
Death was a shadow that pursued others, not him. He was free.

But time, cruel and ceaseless, has a way of eroding even the sturdiest of
foundations. Decades bled into centuries, and the Immortal began to notice
it—the decay. Not of his body, for that remained unblemished, but of
everything else. Friends grew old. Lovers withered like petals under an
unforgiving sun. He held their hands as they breathed their last, watched the
light leave their eyes, and buried them beneath stones that he would one
day forget the locations of.

“I’ll remember you,” he would whisper, tears carving rivers down a face that
could not age. But memory is treacherous, and centuries are long. Faces
blurred, names faded, and soon they were ghosts in the recesses of his mind
—not gone, but unreachable, like words scrawled on paper left out in the
rain.

He tried to love again. Again and again. But the result was always the same.
They would age, their once-bright eyes dimming as the years weighed
heavier and heavier upon them, while he remained untouched by the
relentless march of time. They would look at him, not with love, but with
something else. Something colder. Resentment, perhaps. Or envy. He could
never be sure.

Eventually, he stopped loving. He stopped trying. He told himself it was

better this way. He became a wanderer, drifting from one corner of the earth
to another, always seeking, though he no longer knew what it was he sought.
Meaning? Redemption? Oblivion? Perhaps all of them, or perhaps none.

But the world changed, as it always does. Villages became cities. Forests
became factories. Humanity grew louder, brighter, and more insufferable.
And he, the Immortal, grew quieter, dimmer, more withdrawn. He became a
relic in a world that had no place for relics.
Insanity came softly, like a fog rolling in over a darkened shore. It whispered
to him in the quiet hours, asking questions he could not answer. “What are
you?” it asked. “Why are you still here? What is the purpose of a life that
never ends?”

He tried to drown it out. He buried himself in distractions, in art and music, in

books and knowledge, in fleeting pleasures that dulled the ache for a while
but never for long. The whispers grew louder. They followed him into his
dreams, until even sleep offered no reprieve. He began to talk to himself,
holding conversations with shadows and reflections. He began to forget
which of the voices in his head were his and which belonged to something
else.

One day, he found himself standing at the edge of a cliff, staring out at an
ocean that stretched endlessly toward the horizon. The waves crashed
below, their rhythm steady and unchanging, as if mocking him. He closed his
eyes and stepped forward, letting gravity pull him into the embrace of the
sea. But it was futile. He awoke hours later on the shore, unscathed, the
ocean having rejected him as if it, too, found him repugnant.

He screamed then, a raw, guttural sound that tore from his throat like an
animal in pain. He screamed until his voice gave out, and then he wept, his
tears mingling with the salt of the sea.

“Why?” he croaked, his voice hoarse and broken. “Why won’t it end?”

But there was no answer. There never was.

And so he wandered on, his mind fraying at the edges, a tapestry of sanity
unraveling thread by thread. He saw the faces of the dead in every stranger.
He heard the laughter of his lost loves in the rustling of leaves. He spoke to
the stars, begged them for answers, cursed them when they remained silent.

He began to wonder if he was the last sane man in a mad universe, or the
maddest man in a sane one. But in the end, it didn’t matter. Sanity, like
everything else, was fleeting.

And so the Immortal walks on, forever caught between life and death, a
ghost in a world that cannot remember him, carrying the unbearable weight
of eternity. He is a monument to the cruelty of existence, a reminder that
some jokes are too bitter to laugh at.

And the worst part? He’s starting to forget his own name.