PROLOGUE
Recently, I read How to Stop Time by Matt Haig, a novel about a man who ages far more slowly than everyone around him. The story follows him across centuries, watching people he loves grow old and disappear while he continues on. Something about that premise stayed with me—the way memory stretches, blurs, and reshapes itself when a life lasts far longer than it should. It got me thinking: what would memory feel like if only one person lived to be 400 years old while everyone else lived normal lives? Since no one has ever lived long enough to tell us how their centuries-old memories feel – just like no one has ever come back from death to recount what it lies beyond – the question became the seed for the thought experiment that follows.
In this piece, I explore, more decisively than Hamlet does in his contemplation of the state after death, this thought experiment through the imagined monologue of such a man—one who remembers, forgets, and reflects on the long-distant past in ways the rest of us can only guess at.
MONOLOGUE
[Quietly, near a window overlooking a timeless landscape]
Four hundred years… and sometimes I still wake expecting to hear the voices of people who have been gone for centuries. Longevity, when it belongs only to you, is not a gift you hold—it’s a room you inhabit alone.
Everyone I once loved lived their natural span, just as people always have. They aged, they weakened, they died… and I kept going. At first I tried to hold every memory close, terrified that forgetting them would be another kind of death. But the centuries have their own logic. Memory thins, the edges blur, and what remains are mere impressions—warm, but drifting further away in the universe of my mind.
How do I feel now? Strange, mostly. Not sorrowing the way I once did, but not untouched either. There is a quiet ache that never quite leaves. I walk through a world of young faces, new families, new stories, while mine stretch back so far that even I struggle to recognize the person I used to be.
The people I lost… I remember them not as portraits but as atmospheres. My parents feel like the sensation of being hugged, rather than two specific faces. Friends from early centuries linger in me only as a jingle of laughter, or just the faint afterglow of being together – warm, cosy – but not as clear images. My siblings, my niece … but wait. Were they there in the first place? Were there truly people tied to me by blood? Oh, yes, thanks to those persistent, involuntary flashes of memory, I recall their names, James and Lydia. But little else. After so many lifetimes have passed since those early days, my remembrances of them have dissolved into abstractions. It’s only by simple logic that I’m sure I watched them grow old, and that I must have been with them in their dying days and that I must have grieved. But that certainty only comes from reasoning. Simple logic gives me facts. It doesn’t retain the lingering rawness of emotions, the sharpness of images I might have had if I’d lived a normal span, an old man in his eighties, reminiscing about the past. The love of my life—her memory has become a feeling more than a person… a warmth in the chest, a softness in the voice when I speak of certain years.
Sometimes, though, something jolts my numbness: a particular melody, a scent, a phrase someone speaks with the same rhythm as a friend long gone. In those déjà vu moments, memory briefly sharpens, and for a heartbeat I see them with startling clarity. It is beautiful—and it hurts. Because the moment I notice that clarity, it slips away again.
Do I feel lonely? Yes, in a way no one around me would understand. Not for company—I have that though I know I will again lose it —but for shared history. No one alive remembers the world I began in. No one remembers the people who made me who I am. Their stories exist only in me, and even I carry them imperfectly now.
I’ve made peace with all this. And I also feel grateful. Grateful that they lived, grateful that I knew them, grateful that even centuries later, the essence of them still stirs within me. They are not gone—not entirely. They’ve faded into the foundation of the person I’ve become. And though details fail me; the influence does not.
But tonight? Tonight I miss the texture of them. The sound, the touch, the weight of a hand in mine. That… that never stops aching. Not sharply. Just… persistently. Like the tide, always there, always pulling something back out to sea.
Four hundred years. You carry what you can. You let the rest become starlight.
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