5 Minute Reads | Anthology

Borrowed Time by MelanieBd

by MelanieBd  

Borrowed Time

The last of the beasts had been tamed.

The parchment had seemed so small in his hands all those years ago, so deceivably frail. The ultimate tool, the final whip. With it the war between mankind and its greatest foe, time, had ended. The ticking clock held no more meaning; it was thrown into the garbage along with words like 'decay', 'age', and 'old'. A simple contract, a signature at the bottom, some drops of blood, and mortality became nothing but a shadow, spoken of like a silly tradition long forgotten, quaint but useless.

He thought back to his times of doubt and ignorance, when he'd wonder at the morality of eternity and man's place in it. Life was not made to last forever, time was too wild a beast, too complex an idea for it to be controlled, used. In the end he'd signed the contract, borrowed thousands of years of life, given into the delicious promise of unending light. Even his misapprehensions about the concept of 'borrowing', of the allusion that the years would have to be given back somehow, ceased to haunt him. The deaths of those unwilling to 'borrow life' were far behind him, lost in a haze of thoughtless centuries, where no limits and no fear had given way to a nervous sort of idleness.

Looking back, he noticed he'd done nothing with his years, nothing with his borrowed time. Eternity, and being a part of it, had intimidated him into insignificance. He'd plunged alone into forever, and drowned. If he had to regret something, it would be not leaving behind any reasons to be missed. But he knew that had been inconceivable. Missed? By who? Who could outlive him? Millions more had borrowed time, some even more than him, but they'd forget him regardless of what he did or didn't do. It had happened to him, losing the faces of those that passed somewhere in the darkness of his consciousness. There was no more room for them, his mind had a endless future to remember.

From the start he had known the possibility of facing an end, but it felt like textbook knowledge, inapplicable to life. Along with so many other things, it had to be forgotten, for it was of no use. A bird cannot fly if it constantly fears the day it will fall from the sky.

The disease was a new one, no more than a couple hundred years old. Much was known of it, but he'd never taken an interest. Surely sometime in the future someone would find a cure, just as they always had before. The disease could not outlive human kind; they had eternity in their hands. But he knew it could outlive him. He'd lost his sense of past and future, both stretching on endlessly over and beyond the horizon. But his place in this eternal line was fixed; it had to come to and end, whatever that was.

When there is no definitive winner to a war, there is no definitive end. He could not honestly say he'd fought the disease, he could not honestly say he'd done anything at all. But the battle had ended in a stalemate, one that could only become unbroken by time itself. Who outlives whom? Bed-ridden, weak, in pain, he decided he was not rooting for himself. Maybe he never had. He'd wanted life once, that much he knew, a long and fruitful life, but he had ceased to live he knew not how long ago. Vaguely he remembered having counted the years at some point, forwards or backwards or something. Now he just floated, pulled along by the tirelessness of time. He didn't even know for how long he'd been sick, for all he knew he'd been in bed forever and would forever stay there.

As his condition worsened, he had tried to think back on the last time he had thought about himself, but drew a blank. Could his own entity get lost in the fold of time that had taken over everything else? Or had he become one with time, senseless and un-tangible, and idea more than a fact?

Many centuries more had passed, or maybe just a minute or two as he tried to make sense of who he'd been, who he still was. A sick man on a bed. A sick man. A man. But not one that was complete. He'd taken bits and pieces of the life of those around him, never quite making a whole. Misshapen, shapeless, he lacked the beauty of mortality.

Until the last moment of his life, spent like thousands before, staring up from his bed, he thought no more of himself.

Then his borrowed time ran out and death came, quick and decisively, giving him nothing more than a single second to welcome the end. But for that moment, suddenly, he existed.