by kai
May 2002
Despite what one might consider to be an extraordinary passage of time, I do remember far more of my early years--including my mortal life--than I will admit to anyone. Those few who have known my true identity usually ask, after all, who wouldn't? I would ask, were I them. Five thousand years! (Probably more like six, if I'm being honest.) The urge to pry is irresistible, human nature being what it is. Did you know this or that famous person? Who built the pyramids and Stonehenge? Were people really all that different way back when, or do only the faces, but not the real story, change over time?
So why then, if I remember, if I could make more than a few major (if private) adjustments to the archaeological record, if I could share those memories with people I've loved and who've loved me across the years, do I hesitate and equivocate and prevaricate?
There are many reasons, of course. When bits and pieces of many of the lives you've lived are on display in museums and private collections the world over, sometimes it's nice to have a thing--something so precious as a memory--that is and forever will be yours alone. Then too, there is the unbelievably pedestrian nature of most of what I recall--hunting, fishing, eating a meal, arguing with my kids--that yields so very little insight into the many men I've been across time, and likely says nothing about who I am today.
These are among the reasons that I will offer up, if forced, to dissuade the more persistent inquiries.
But then, there are other less noble reasons to keep quiet.
I can roll with the times with the best of them, I can blend in, fade out, and go native on command. Given the lives I've lived, I'm not overmuch concerned with dignity or prudery or whatnot. But. Even still, I can't quite bring myself to admit aloud, to anyone, that the clearest memory of my youth--of all my petty childhood triumphs and tragedies, of everything I know that could rewrite history--is that of:
Me, standing under a tree, eyes closed, dappled sunlight on my shoulders, my head thrown back against the rough bark, with my hand on my prick doing what adolescent boys the world over do most, if not best.
Were I to share this with someone like, say Amanda, she would no doubt reply--after snickering for a good long while--that all it means is that I'm no different than every other human male since we climbed up out of the primordial ooze. And how could I disagree? After all, I am just a guy.
But still.
I've long since left adolescence behind and have passed into some new and strange developmental category known only to a few bristlecone pine trees. Even so, through it all, whether bored or horny, alone, with a partner or a group, my hand and my prick have remained a constant, ever available source of entertainment throughout the years. A span of five millennia offers ample time for boredom, believe you me, and so I suppose it's quite fortunate that I'm easily amused.
But, despite the sheer inevitability of one's hand finding a pleasing rhythm upon one's cock, over many years and many lands the practice has been mystified: revered, reviled, formalized into rites of passage, hushed up, or laid out in the open, you name it. A complex swirl of historical controversy now surrounds what is one of the most innocuous of human acts. So, I keep my mouth firmly shut on the subject of my early years--and that memory in particular. Annoyingly and smugly so, according to MacLeod, who is convinced that I know more than I've told.
Of course Duncan himself remains stubbornly--and annoyingly--oblivious to my own interest. In him.
And so, although I am not by nature an enormously patient man, fortunately, as I have said before, I am quite easily amused.
Finis.