Other

I know not if I am the last.

What I can tell you is that I am alone. I have been so for nearly a century, now. One would think that it would grow tiresome, but it has yet to become so. I’ve not met, or seen, or even heard whisper of, another of my kind. I may be the last, or the rest may have done as I have: withdrawn.

In some ways, I suppose, this life is as romantic as fiction and fantasy would have you believe. Watching as ages pass; bearing silent witness as empires rise and fall, as people flourish and dissipate. The tedium of standing alone and untouched in the ever flowing current of time can be lonely, for a moment, but even that is lost. Such petty thoughts have no place under the weight of eternity and all it has to offer.

I spend my time in study. I enjoy the books and scrolls that have come into my collection. All of them have been lovingly pored over, each savored for the treasures it offered up. I know each book that sits on the shelves of my library, and well. They are my closest friends, sitting and watching the ages pass with me.

After all, my living friends fade. The closer we become, the faster they go.

It is the way of things.

I will admit a certain fondness for the living, breathing friends that have passed through my life. After all, a book cannot laugh at a joke, or cry at the passing of a loved one. It will never shiver against the cold of a winter’s night, even as it aides the reader against such things. But it will not run, or skip, or hold another.

Or blush.

They seem as fireworks, the mortal ones; brief, colorful, beautiful; each and every one different from the last, and special in its own way. Some of them I gain the opportunity to observe closely.

I, at some point in the last few decades, found it to be increasingly difficult to simply closet myself away without stirring suspicion in the rest of the inhabitants of my city. I hesitate to call them neighbors, as none live nearby. I began to assimilate. I am fortunate enough to be forever early twenties in appearance, and as such, I have found it easy to blend in.

In recent time, I began to create my family line. It became necessary to do so in the early nineteen hundreds when I began playing with the stock market. A useful tool, indeed. Having seen the ways in which progress is made gave a fair bit of insight into the proper companies to invest in. The governing body, however, grew mildly suspicious that my assets never seemed to change hands. As a result, at least on paper, I am now my own great-great-granddaughter.

I find it amusing that in the midst of all the progress made, having the right thing on the right paper is still one of the most important things in day to day life. I find it more amusing, still, that the papers become increasingly easy to forge.

Only in the last century, or so, have women begun to be educated formally, and as equals alongside the men of the country. I watched as a University was founded for men. After a century of things running smoothly, women brought about mass upheaval by demanding entrance. It seemed inevitable to me, this rising in status of the women of the country, but when it came, it was no less entertaining when it happened.

When the worst of the rabble had died down, I enrolled. For each of my generations I have enrolled, and now I hold several PhDs, and a few Masters. All of the roommates that I take in, for all of their higher education, never noticed that I bear a striking resemblance to all of the women in the photos hanging in the library.

I take them in due to necessity. I suppose a certain nostalgia pervades the practice, now.

It is, after all, how I met him. My greatest friend. The holder of my secrets. If I had the equipment necessary, I might even call him my better half.

Soul mate, even.

He faded, as do they all, But he was the brightest of all the others, before and after. I mourned his loss more than any. I cannot even say that the loss of my kin, nor even my fall from grace caused such a feeling of despair or loneliness than his passing did.

It was in the mid sixties that he came to take my spare bedroom suite. So full of promise and naivety that it made even my jaded heart warm slightly. He was so unlike the others, wanting to interact with me and have the occasional meal at my “family’s” dinner table.

We would study together; converse about all the various ideas that our professors lay at our feet and take turns quizzing one another about what the exams would hold. I felt…something. Something different around him. Truthfully, feeling anything at all made for a red letter day by this point in my life.

After a semester of living at my house, I felt the aching burn that accompanied the constant pangs of hunger. I crept to his room and stood over his sleeping form, silent as only my kind are. I could not go through with it. Not yet.

So, I stood there, staring at him. Watching. Trying, in seeming vain, to understand what it was that stayed my proverbial hand this night. For over half a year, this young man had shared my home. He spoke to me as not simply an equal, but a friend. I had taken him, in a sense, many times, and I had thought to do so many more times. Yet I could not. For what reason had this reluctance washed over me? Why now?

Why him?

I could taste his pulse change. He began to wake, and there I stood, unable to move. Not wanting to, for that matter. His eyes opened, looked around and finally, after lifetimes, focused on my face.

It was strange, he looked at me with no fear, or even shock, for that matter. I had never come across such a man as he.

“I was wondering about you. When you’d come, I mean,” he said, simply, as though there had been an agreement of sorts.

“I have been,” I replied, cautious.

“Yes. I knew.” He sat up a little, leaning on the headboard and looking at his hands in his lap. “Not at first, I guess, but there were dreams.” He looked back up into my eyes. A startlingly piercing gaze for a young man. “I dreamt of you.”

Dreams? I had never heard even a whisper of leaving dreams for the ones we took. What an intriguing concept.

“What about me?” I had to know. Did he know? Had he learned my secrets?

Did it matter?

“You’re…” He looked down again. “You’re Other, aren’t you?” I could hear the emphasis in other. He stared at me, and I searched his eyes. I looked for everything that a predator looked for in its potential prey and threats. I looked for fear, and there was none. I looked for guile, and again, nothing.

The only thing that I was met with was the same naivety that he’d first come in my door with. To be fair, there was more strength behind it now, closer to idealism, but too much innocence remaining to be called that.

“Yes,” I replied finally. “I am Other.”

I have read tales and heard stories of some great weight being lifted from one’s shoulders or back with such an admission, but it is not so. It feels much lighter than that. It feels like the removal of a cloak, or even a shaft of light when one has been living in perpetual twilight. Freeing, I suppose, but not from chains. From something akin to Purgatory.

I suppose my experience may differ from others simply because I have not actively sought to lie about anything other than my name and family. I have lied by omission about my origins and nature; simply avoiding an easy conversation to avoid. Once, I would have said that no one, not even my roommates would have ever drawn a solid enough conclusion to ask, but here the proof sat that I was wrong.

It was the longest conversation that we had ever had. I told him everything that he had the nerve to ask about, and did my utmost to fill in the spaces he seemed most curious about. I gave him answers to questions he didn’t know enough about to ask. Gave him details of my life, or lack thereof, that no one had known.

Most because I made sure they could not remember. I let him remember, though I clouded any pain from his mind. Once we could make the sensations addictive, only to have a constant source of food around. Not for him though. He was better than that. After that one night, he came to me. Not as a victim, nor addict, but as a peer, offering what he had to offer.

He left not long after. Or, rather, not long by my reckoning. He stayed the remainder of the semester and at the end, upon graduation, he had to move away. It was harder to stay in touch in those times than now, in the Information Age, where everything is a few button clicks away.

He managed, though. I think that he understood that my reclusiveness was not the sort of thing to change easily, so he never became upset that I did not return as long of letters as the ones he wrote. When I did reply, it was more in response to the philosophical questions. Occasionally, he would ask about some event in history, and I would answer, but he refrained more from those. Perhaps because he did not want to remind me of my age.

Perhaps because he, himself, did not wish to dwell on it.

I cannot say. I never asked, and I do not think that he thought to offer his reasoning. Like other things, it was mutually, nonverbally accepted. I cannot blame him, as the same unease once crept across the back of my neck when I spoke to some of the elders. I could not, at that time, fathom the weight of ages that rested on their minds.

I gave him small amounts of the counsel I had to offer in many parts of his life. He worried briefly about the woman he later married, and then, about the child they shared. He told me once, that had circumstances been different, I would have been asked to Godmother his son. I had not the heart to remind him that had circumstances been any other that I would not have been present to meet him or his son.

I am of the belief that he knew. He, my dearest friend, was too levelheaded for such things.

I think that, were the subject broached, we would not have made good lovers. Thankfully, it was not; that was a bridge left uncrossed, or, really, acknowledged. More thankfully, his wife understood this. I have never met her, and I believe that was by design on his part.

I was given the impression in her first letter to me that she believed me to be a wise old woman who had rented out a room for the companionship. Certainly not the creature I am.

She told me of his untimely passing. He had been hit by a car; the driver not paying attention. Her handwriting, while it began even and neat, grew ever-so-slightly erratic and uneven as the letter grew in length. Much of it was the tale of a loving wife whose loving husband had been torn from her.

I drew into myself for a week before remembering that she would most likely want a response in an amount of time more reasonable to her reckoning than my own. I sent her a letter extending my deepest sympathies and shared a few stories of his time with me; I praised her courage and offered an ear and a hand should she need either.

She sent a note, shorter and much more composed than the first, thanking me for my kindness and all. It smacked of post funeral thank you notes. We exchanged a few more before she moved on from the death of her husband and I fell back into my routines; my life still more empty than before.

He is, and will continue to be missed. His photograph is now nestled among my own in the library. That eager, shining smile and bright eyes laughing softly at the stupidity of it all.

I still rent out a suite in my house to the young men and women that attend the university, however, the special ones get his rooms. The bright and shiny ones.