Five Hundred

“I traded my soul to the devil for five hundred years added to the middle of my life,” she said quite seriously. She watched the horizon bob up and down in the distance. I looked at her with the same careful concentration that she gave to nothing. She was lost in the space of many centuries worth of memories searching through the faces and the days that left no real mark on so long a life.

“You trade your soul to the devil for five hundred years?” I repeated slowly, “Why?”

She looked at me, or rather in my direction, but her mind was still lost in recollection. “Because God wouldn’t give them to me, and the devil would.”

I shook my head trying to straighten out my thoughts, “yes, but why five hundred years, why not 100? Why not 1000? Why five hundred years? What did you need to do that would take so long?”

She began to hover just below the surface of her memories nearly touching the surface and returning to our current time. “I had to find what could be done with enough time. I had to find if it was merely time that limited one from having a full life. One hundred years is only one life time, and one thousand was more than the devil was willing to offer.”

I watched her face as she ran again the nearly endless memories contain within her mind. “And is it time that has limited you?”

She shook her head solemnly. She looked up at the stars, one of the few things that had remained constant in her extended life. “I never found what I was looking for. I searched so very hard, but I never found what I needed to find.”

“Surely you still have time? How many of your five hundred years have you used?”

She looked squarely at me, at last returning to our present, “Five hundred and ten this past August,” she smiled sorrowfully.

She didn’t look a day past thirty, yet so many years were clearly visible in her eyes. A depth of wisdom was there that could not be confused.

“I have lived long enough to learn every language, see every country, even the founding of most of them. I’ve lived long enough to see the march of progress crush the old world into the dust, see the modern world come and then be made obsolete. I have lived long enough to learn every instrument, and every song every written. I have seen and done everything a hundred times over. I have done all these things, and yet I still have not found what I have been searching for. In fact, I’ve been searching for so long I don’t think I can even remember what it might have been that I sought.”