“Now,” she continues hesitantly, “I guess… the best word to describe it is….” She pauses again. “There isn’t any one word that best describes it, actually. I’m frustrated, but I’m content. There’s nothing left for me to do, but I’ve done it all. I didn’t want it to end, but I’m glad that it did. You know?”
You reply that you think that you understand what she means.
“Nah, you don’t. I don’t know why I asked,” she continues. “And I hope you never do, [pc.name]. Being immortal can really fucking suck sometimes.”
“But!” She slaps both of her knees; the snapping sound of her hands clapping against the bare skin of her legs echoes throughout the temple. “That’s not to say that life isn’t, or ever be, not worth living. Life is amazing, [pc.name], and every moment of it is worth living; it’s immortality that sucks. There’s a big difference.”
She leans forward, waving her right hand through the air, her palm facing outward, as if she were rubbing it across a canvas. “When you get to be my age, and you think you’ve seen everything, you learn how to find the things that you <b>haven’t</b> seen yet, and you can find it <b>everywhere.</b> There’s beauty everywhere in the world, [pc.name]; climbing a mountain just to see the view at the top is an experience I could do endlessly, and every time, it’d be different. The weather would be different; the season would be different; the time of day would be different.”
“But that’s thinking pretty big, I realize, and not everyone has the energy of a phoenix to climb a mountain whenever they want,” she winks. “It can be easy to take something like a walk through the forest for granted – the colors can be <b>beautiful</b> during every season of the year. When you watch a honeybee dip into a flower and then leave before she could collect any pollen, you gotta wonder, what’s going through her little bee head to turn down a flower like that?” She runs the flat of her palm across the smooth stone floor of the temple. “This temple – who built it? How many times has this statue been fired up to tinge the wall black like that? Am I the first person to want to bang in this corridor?”
She laughs well-meaningly at her own question. “It may sound juvenile, and hell, maybe it is. Maybe I’m living life ‘wrong’ somehow by finding beauty in what most people would think is some of the most inane shit.” She relaxes backward, leaning onto her rump and putting her hands behind herself to support her weight. “But, at my age, either everything is dull and boring and not worth doing again – or you find a way to find something interesting in this world where you wouldn’t expect to find it.”
She sighs through her nose. “And being bored is too exhausting for me. I may have done damn near everything there is to do, [pc.name], but I’d rather do it all again than be bored.”