Like All the Others

When you are as old as I am, 612 years to be exact, you start noticing patterns.

Not the grand patterns of rise and fall of empires, those are easy to spot.

I am talking about the small ones, the familiar ones, the way different people have the same laugh, the way someone you have never met reminds you of someone you buried 200 years ago.

A woman in Tehran tucks her hair behind her ears, a woman in Tokyo does it the same way 300 years later.
A boy in Cairo asks the same question about stars that a girl in Calcutta once did centuries ago.

Minor details change, the patterns remain. Life rhymes with itself.

I have fallen in love more times than I can count.

Four marriages in four different countries to women who looked nothing alike and somehow managed to break my heart in the same place.

They each taught me something about myself, about the world and the patterns:

The first taught me that love can arrive and leave unexpectedly.
The second taught me that wanting someone and knowing someone are entirely different things.
The third taught me that familiarity does not breed love.
The fourth taught me that some people stay with you long after they have gone.

They all collectively taught me not to pretend that I am any wiser than before, and made me realize that loneliness is perfectly capable of disguising itself as love and peace.

My heart though is an unreliable historian and memory edits every romance into a better story.

I have had children, threw them up in the air and caught them gently when they were small enough to believe that I could fix anything.

I watched them grow older.
Then older than I.
Then old.
Then gone.

It is a peculiar feeling, watching your children wither away as you remain unchanged. The first time it felt unnatural, the fifth time it felt cruel. After a dozen times, it simply became a thing to carry.

Immortality as I have come to understand is just endless loss.

And loss repeated often becomes a routine, like bleak weather you no longer comment on.

The hardest part was not time, it was attachment.

I noticed it once again in Lisbon.

I had not planned to stay there for long. Big cities after a while just felt like a copy of memory, same streets, different names.

She worked at a small cafe by the river.

She asked if I wanted sugar, I said no, she brought it anyway.

This is how it always starts, not with meaning, not by fate, but with an insignificant gesture small enough to be dismissed,

The mole on her nose reminded me of someone I could no longer recollect.
That was new.
It usually takes memory just a few minutes to start pretending.
To overlay someone old on someone new.
This time it arrived later, hesitation has learned a new timing.

We spoke the way people do when they do not yet know they are building towards something fragile.

I recognized the pattern, of course, the familiar attachment forming under the illusion of choice.

Still, I stayed, because I always stay long enough to confirm what comes next.