Imagine if people stopped growing old? Alex Turner-Cohen Alex Turner-Cohen Imagine if you could live forever. Alex Turner-Cohen explores the difference between living, growing and merely existing in a world where people never age.
The cupcake was too sweet. There was icing on top and even a few rainbow sprinkles. Scrunching up my nose, I forced myself to swallow the mouthful. I placed the rest of the cupcake back inside the box and sealed it tightly. Then I pulled out a toothbrush and some toothpaste to ensure the sugar didn’t erode my molars. I started brushing. It had been almost 150 years since I’d had dessert. Usually I would never indulge in such a way but today I was in a celebratory mood. “Happy birthday to you,” I sang softly. “Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday dear Gabrielle and Amber. Happy birthday to us.” The murmur of the grass blades and the mumble of the wind was the only applause for my hesitant voice. The tune didn’t sound quite right, but after thousands of years, noone could quite remember how the original went anyway. It was my 1000th birthday. And Gabrielle’s. A millennium was a long time. The years had blurred into decades, the decades into centuries. There had been so many moments that it sometimes felt like my life was an ugly brown canvas. All the colours had mixed together, changing into one monochromatic blend that was neither remarkable nor easy on the eye. A star had collided with the earth in
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2048. As a result, humans had absorbed some of that star’s qualities. After our 25th birthdays, we stopped getting old. We had gained the ability to last hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of years. Still, society wasn’t immortal or invincible. We could die from physical injuries and illnesses. It was very hard to reproduce. But if we looked after ourselves properly, we could live forever, the theory went. And so, I was very, very careful. It was baffling to me, to imagine a world where people had lines on their faces, where they could forget their own names and drop dead simply from old age. How archaic! Equally as baffling was the idea of retirement and pensions. To think one could stop working at a certain age? What a dream! There was no such thing as retirement anymore; to stop working was a luxury most couldn’t afford. Ever. I sat on top of a mountain. A small one, but awe-inspiring nonetheless. The city of Crescent sprawled beneath me, buildings standing tall against the horizon like tombstones in a graveyard. The sky was dreary, the sunlight weak. A lone tree clutched the mountain top itself, branches bare, clinging to some semblance of life despite all odds. Usually this was a popular tourist destination, according to the guidebook.
art:
@rainy_chalk
