Escape from Paradise

Chapter 11: Days of The Past

"Diana, what would you do if you could live forever?" asked Larry and kicked away from the ground setting a wide swing in motion. Caressing golden curls of the love of his life he gazed at a twisting stream which sparkled in sunlight reflections as it bounced from rock to rock and splashed at a fallen bough. The place sparkled with life; a life of another kind than the busy Paradise streets; a life of chirping flocks of birds, of woodpeckers, of howling predators in the deep forest, of butterflies dancing on the tips of reed, of dark leeches lurking on underwater stones of copper and silver hue.

With dreamy unfocused gaze at a point deep inside the forest, Diana replied, "I would live with you until the time ended." She contemplated the idea which sounded alluring but inevitably in her mind lead to some inevitable flaws. Time changed things. Time changed people and their relationships. She had seen her parents grow old and quarrel. Love in her eyes was not a given it was a subject which required through and heavy work to sustain.

Swinging back and forth, kicking the ground every now and then, Larry. "Would you? Would you, really?"

"Yes."

Diana gently stroked a finger long scar on Larry's forearm, which, had changed little over the six months. She still remembered his dumb visage before the spiderweb-fiber plate slipped out of his fingers while he boasted, 'Thin as a paper, hard as titanium, sharp as a knife, I will get a Nobel for this...oh...oh...wait this was not supposed to happen...oh...crap...' The saddest thing was that Larry never learned from his mistakes and two days later managed to cut the fresh wound the same way only because he had always been act first, think later type of person.

She knew that the question 'What would you do if you could live forever?' had not been philosophical. Larry has always been fascinated with life, all its joys and provisions, the endless possibilities and first times which in no way could be experienced in a single lifetime. 'I will beat death one way or another,' he had repeated many times with a zealot's madness in his eyes and she knew that with his skills it was a feasible task.

She said in a mellow tone, "Do you think a millionth hug or a millionth kiss would be the same as the first or the hundredth? Larry, the human mind is created to endure for less than a century for a reason. I fear that no matter what we did, our lives would become dull and the sun that shines between us in time would fade away. I know your fascination with immortality but strangely, even the best things have flaws."

With a smirk, Larry replied, "My solution would be amnesia." After a thinking pause, he added, "It would let us taste the ice-cream as if we were tasting it for the first time. It would let us fly on a plane for the first time and we could relive the magic again and again. It would let us jump off a bridge with a rope and feel the same thrill over and over again. Memory is stupid, bothersome and painful." Larry stopped to stare at a two-winged steel bird drawing a white line across the sun.

"That way you would lose all good memories as well. I'm not sure if that is worth it."

"But if we change nothing, life won't get any better," Larry said.

"I'm not sure that it is possible for life to get any better."

"Why?"

"Because life is imperfect and no matter what you do it will remain that way. I often wonder what terrible being must have created this universe. Who would make us emerge from the darkness into chaos and then send us back into darkness? Who would create such miserable and fragile creatures as us? Who would put constraints of constants and laws of nature that we can not beat? It's as if the world is created to be our torturer, our unbeatable enemy. What father would do that for his children?"

Larry said, "Indeed. That is why, I believe, we could do it better because we have learned from the mistakes of our creator."

"I'm not sure. Can an imperfect human create a perfect world? Perhaps, or perhaps it is only an illusion."