Immortality 03 Poem by Mario, Lucien, Rene Odekerken

Immortality is not the gift we imagine it to be.
It is not glory eternal, nor a boundless expanse of possibilities.
It is a weight--
a slow, unyielding pull on the soul,
like a stone dragged through a deep and silent sea.

To live forever is to witness the world become a stranger.
Empires crumble, languages die,
mountains rise and fall,
and the faces you once held dear fade into the fog of memory.
Time erases everything but you,
leaving behind a ceaseless parade of beginnings and endings.
You are the constant, the anomaly,
the solitary thread in a tapestry that unravels endlessly.

At first, there is wonder.
A century passes like a breath, and the future feels infinite.
You walk among the ever-changing world, marveling at its transformations.
But eternity stretches. The faces blur.
The moments you cherish lose their sharpness, as if touched by frost.
The same sun rises and falls,
indifferent to your existence,
and you begin to wonder if the price of immortality is the slow death of meaning.

There is a strange kind of sorrow in knowing you will outlast everything you love.
The beauty of a fleeting life lies in its urgency, its finiteness.
Without an ending, what is the purpose of the story?
Without the shadow of death, what does it mean to truly live?

Immortality is a horizon that recedes forever.
You walk toward it, always moving,
never arriving.
The stars burn and extinguish,
civilizations rise and decay, and yet endure.
And in your endurance, you begin to envy the fragile beings who vanish like smoke,
leaving behind nothing but
the warmth of their brief, brilliant lives.