Soldier

His explaination was that when you push against other people's or things existences..they push back. He told me that the pain I was feeling and all the hardships that had plagued me had been because I wasnt able to control it. I asked him what it was, desperate for a name, some type of..designation for my..our affliction. "The only thing I can call it.." he said "..is..slipping, out of their lives, out of their pace..just slipping away." So that is what I call it..and it made and still does makes sense.

Over the weeks and months that followed I met with him more and more, always in the same place. I began to learn from him, about his likes dislikes, but he never told me about himself no more than a few trivial things anyway, more importantly though he told me about what I..what we were. He told me that he had met others like us, and some rather unlike us. I was voracious, this had haunted me know for over ten years, and I wanted to get on living. It was beginning to wear on my parents a man at my age still living at home had to have been a burden to them. There were some questions that he simply did not have the answers too, but he did have warnings, cryptic things that he had learned from the others that he had met. He told me about what can happen if we try to do too much too fast. About what our fate can be, and about the side effects of the "condition". He told me that I would not die. For some reason, even though people sometimes wish that they could have that gift, when you are told that it is so..it doesnt settle, even through all I had experienced, from Limon to now, I didnt..couldnt believe him. He explained that because we were just visitors in everyone else's world now, that we observed the rules, but were not bound by them. It was alot, alot to be told, alot to digest, but more alot to understand. When I woke up the morning after I looked at myself in the mirror. I had done this a thousand times before, but this time I really looked. I stared, at my eyes, my hair. Not a single grey hair, no new wrinkles..nothing. I was the same man I had been that morning December 22 1944. It was true, noone seemed to notice, people told me that I looked good for my age, but I had never thought of it. I suppose that I just assumed that things were happening as they should. I knew on that morning, or at least had a premonition that I would be where I am today, alone. As winter fell in 1955 Russell and I had our last talk. I remember he seemed distressed. When I asked him what it was he said it was nothing. He told me then about himself, about what he could never say before. He was a soldier too, and he fought and nearly died as I had, but he had fought in the Great war, the year that I was born, Russell was 30. Yet here he stood, he could not have been more than 7 or 8 years my senior, but according to his story he was over 70 years of age.