Page 97 of We Were Eternal Once

“I’ve just arrived,” I told her. She smirked.

“Arrived? So formal.”

I’d tried to modernize my English with what I saw on sitcoms, but sometimes I still said something that made her laugh. She called me Mel and told me I was an old soul, that she could see it in my eyes.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Two thousand years old,” I replied.

She cackled and slammed the top of the bar, signaling for another drink from the bartender. He poured two small drinks that smelled like gasoline. I emptied mine on the floor before tilting it into my mouth. I copied her grimace.

“Where are from? Your accent…strange,” she said.

“Greece,” I replied.

“I’ve never met anyone from Greece,” she said, twirling her empty glass between her fingers. “Tell me, Mel, is the future socialist or capitalist? How do we escape the inevitable collapse?”

“Everything collapses eventually,” I said. “Nothing is forever.”

“Love, perhaps,” she suggested.

“Especially not love.”

She took me to the underground. It was metaphorical and literal—a culture ignored by the mainstream, hidden in basements and condemned buildings. They listened to grating music on too-loud speakers that frayed and hissed with age. Everything was repurposed. All trash went to building a new piece of furniture or to someone’s art.

She took me to slam poetry readings, where the youth cried and shouted and screamed their frustrations. There were no whispers of anger behind closed doors, no judgement to those who said their feelings aloud. The audience screamed with the presenter. It was raw and uncomfortable.

You would have hated it.

That’s all I kept thinking, everywhere I floated.

You would have hated this open display of emotion, been embarrassed by the people on stage. I could hear your offhand comments, dripping with cynicism, anytime the humans made a volatile point.

The music, you would have liked. The first time I heard the melancholy chords pumping through the speakers, I was suddenly in that house in Paris, with your fingers drumming a tune while I tried desperately for your attention.

How long were you with that other woman? How long had you been courting her, while I was finding friendship? The ache had dulled—I suspect being buried for centuries would do that to a hurt. It dulled, but did not disappear.

“Perhaps you have something to say?” Réka asked once. We spoke in Hungarian, a language so much like others I’d learned. They melted together, a past and present version of the languages I’d gathered over the centuries. She helped me with Hungarian and I helped with her English.

“There are no words,” I told her, hoping she’d understand.

“Then scream?” she suggested.

I did not fear being before the humans. The crowd was small, twenty or so young people who’d watched their world collapse while stuck behind an iron curtain. I once thought humans incapable of understanding the depth of my feelings because their lives were so fleeting. Everything was temporary to them, while I was eternal.

And you and I were eternal, once.

I worried what I might see when I looked down upon them. Would it be the reverence of the cult in Alexandria? Would it be the dissection of Le Sang Bleu? Would it be Zora’s glassy-eyed stare as she gazed at the ceiling?

“My mother used to say ‘the only way out is through,’” Réka said.

“What does that mean?”

“You go forward, even when it is hard. You just go forward, and eventually it will be behind you.”

Go forward. To where, though? How far must I travel to dig myself free of the cobwebs of what held me down? Was there a world where I did not long for my ending?

I stood on the makeshift stage and considered my words. When they didn’t come, I sang. I opened my mouth and sang one of the temple songs from my youth. How is it that I still remembered them? So many parts of my past were lost to me, buried under the weight of more significant events.