Ruins of Rome

Ruins of Rome

           I had imagined that dying would be so much more dramatic. Like you would die and then there would be this bright light that would invite you to heaven and you’d get to see everyone you loved and lost. That’s what I signed up for, not this.

           I woke up like normal, rising from my bed and listening to my neighbors shouting at each other through the thin walls. They had what was classically a love/hate relationship, each too addicted to the other to realize that they just didn’t work. I was single. I had always been single because unlike my neighbors I knew I was toxic.

I ran the shower and dressed for work. I didn’t bother with breakfast knowing that I would just get coffee on the way. Coffee was the official breakfast of college professors anyway.

I always walked to class. I was the stereotype embodied, the middle-aged man who’d never married and had spent my whole life in the education system. I was the professor of history no one really liked because I was boring and my subject was boring. The only reason they ended up in my class at all was that their programs of study demanded they take a history course and mine was the only one general enough to be an easy pass. When I was a young and less bitter man I used to think I was superior to those who spurned history, after all I understood the past. I held the keys in my hand to a world that was ours, but not ours anymore. I thought I had learned enough to say that I understood the past and could therefore control my future.

It was stupid I know. After all just look at me, lying there and not a single soul who noticed.

There are those who would define the measure of a man. They would define his worth by money or power or even his legacy. All these things have in common is that they left something behind. Some mark scratched across the surface of time that says I was here and I lived a life worth remembering, but I was a collector of knowledge. My mind was my greatest asset and now it was simply a pile of decaying tissue. My heart stopped and bam, just like that I was gone. My collection of knowledge, the history I so loved and then hated only to find I could not leave it, abandoned me.

Rome did not fall in a day, it did not simply go up in flames and vanish to time. Rome had gouged itself so deeply into humanity that even today as the places the romans visited or lived lay in ruins we remember the legacy they left behind. We even write fictions and have characters live there once again. I admit that I too had been lured in by the immortal grace of the Roman Empire. I had mastered the topic, I had memorized the names and the dates. I knew the people like they were friends.

They hovered now just on the edge of my vision, specters come to watch the exodus of my soul.

I used to lead a trip once every few years through Italy. I’d bring my talking points with me, but the eighteen year olds were young, invulnerable and just looking to get legally drunk without their parents looking. It was often that I would speak to the open air around me and not a single word would be captured by my students. When I was younger this had bothered me, but there was no point really when they were recycled every few years.

Young minds were always the most malleable, they were still open to learning and to new experiences. They had firsts still allotted to them.

A crowd had started to gather now. Hands over mouths as police rejects with shining badges labeled campus security tried to keep an order to the chaos that always ensued when people dropped dead. There were sirens screaming in the distance. I just scanned the crowd around me as the shadowed figures at the edge of my vision started to bleed into sharper focus.

There was a sort of fanciful quality to dying, to watching the sack of flesh that your soul had resided in sitting empty on the ground. We understood so little about something that would happen to all of us one day. We just accepted it as inevitable as the sun rising.

We were mortal. We could…would die.

The only way people could live forever was if someone had cared enough to write down their deeds for posterity. The history of famous men and women was the only immortality we knew. It was the goal of narcissists and saints to do something within their limited lifespan that would warrant an entry into tomes hardly anyone even cared about.

We all wanted to live forever, few ever got the opportunity.

You see there is a secret, one that I stumbled across quite by accident. The shades came closer and I could see now that they were all young men. Too young to have been ripped from bodies. Men barely older than boys, still malleable and open to new experiences. I could hear them wailing now as they struggled against the weight of their own fragile existence. They wished to tear me apart, to fold my soul into them.

Perhaps they thought it justice.

I saw the boy in the crowd then. He was young and beautiful with shaggy brown hair and wide eyes. I didn’t even glance at my body as I floated towards him. The specters howled. I ignored them as I came level with the boy. His eyes were fixed through me to look on with morbid curiosity as the EMTs tried in vain to revive my body.

I would not be going back.

I reached out my hand and laid in on the boy’s cheek.

My first had been my own son. Perhaps it is terrible to admit, but it had been an accident that time. I had died and was as I am now. I had set my hand on his chest and I had reached though him.

You see death keeps a collection of souls, he does not care as to whose soul it is he reaps as long as there is a soul to be taken.

I moved my hand down to the boy’s chest and with a cry I thrust my open palm through his torso. The boy froze, his whole body stiffening as his soul fought to remain where it had always lived, but I was stronger.

He looked at me now. His pearlescent face was wide and open with shock. He opened his mouth to speak, but I was done with him. I fell into his body.

Air filled my lungs and I looked out over the scene unfolding before me. A white sheet as being draped over the history professor. Someone had started crying.

I looked up to the far edge of my vision where the specters still hovered. Their indistinct shapes were fading rapidly as I felt the life and vitality of youth flow through me once again.

History is written by victors, and they all think themselves the hero of the story. I knew I was the villain.

I really just couldn’t bring myself to care. You know now the undisclosed truth to immortality is immorality, a soul for a soul.

I trust you know how to keep a secret.