Flash Fiction: Forever

I stopped counting years after I turned 121. I’m not sure why that number. I had been very careful to remember all the other big days – different milestones they meant, the people who came and went during each successive celebration, but the big one-two-one seemed so unimportant to me. So insignificant.

Just as I planned to begin my day like so many before, I lost concentration. Distracted and derailed by who knows what. I wasn’t sure where it came from, but it tickled my brain in the most unpleasant way. An itch you can’t scratch. I turned in circles, trying to make it disappear but it wouldn’t. It lingered there, whatever it was, and conquered any tiny remnant of the old fashioned word “birthday”.

People said I should be excited by this new year, but I wasn’t interested in celebrating anymore. Balloons were always the same, cake was never as sweet as it used to taste, and frankly I had enough stuff to tide me over for the next hundred years. Everyone had the big hundredth birthday bash or the ever-increasing two-hundredth birthday ceremony, but the second life, as we called it, those second hundred years, were less reliable than the first half but twice as reckless. Even still, it was just another day. A broken record of a song I had grown tired of years ago.

In a frenzy to find the source of my discontent, I searched my house like a blissful robber, turning over furniture, pulling out drawers. I inspected the attic and the basement just the same, peeling back layers of dust until the air became thick with the past. Something compelled me to keep going, just like always. Something forced me into each passing second, maybe the same thing that locked my face in youth. That relentless pull to the future, never knowing what might come, but knowing it inevitably would.

Thing was, no one could stop me from aging. No one could stop me from living, either. You’d think after a hundred and twenty-one years I would have seen it all, done it all, and I had, but only the things people thought were meant for a normal life. What did that mean anyway? I kept going, kept pushing, kept waking up and falling asleep, kept eating, kept dreaming, I went non-stop because on this train there was no final destination. My journey was a never-ending loop.

For once I wanted to slow down, look around, breath the crisp air, and truly get to know the people and places I called home. The phantom noise or maybe smell gripped me as I stood in my disheveled kitchen. Was it the drone of bees or the squeal of a car breaking too fast? Was is the laughter of children or the smell of fresh bread? I realized had experienced this sensation before, I had searched for it in the eyes of others, but I couldn’t seem to find the source.

I turned over cushions and bedspreads, upended everything I owned. The one thing left was the hallway mirror, glistening with a shimmer of sunlight. But even when I searched behind it, even when I felt along the wall for any sign of disturbance, I came up empty. I fixed my eyes on my own puzzled gaze staring back in the mirror.  What was I looking for?