sunset immortal

(When Josephine was young, she was told she could have anything. And when Josephine was young, she wanted to live forever.

When you’re a child, you think like a child. When you’re a child, eighty, fifty, and even thirty years seem like an eternity. When you’re a child, you don’t think about everyone you love dying. You don’t think about death. You don’t think about those things.

You don’t think about anything at all.)

As she pushes the heavy lid of the coffin open, the sunlight filtering through a nearby window makes her squint her eyes. Josephine checks her phone and sees it’s an hour in the early morning; she must get up. There are things to do. There are papers to sign, games to play, summons to pull.

It’s difficult to keep to a schedule when her days meld into each other. She can only tell the passage of time through the setting sun and the persistent, gnawing hunger in the pits of her stomach when she forgets a meal for a week or two.

But it doesn’t actually matter, she thinks. She has all the time she could ever want and not want. The world could stop spinning and hers would still revolve, endlessly, forever.

On the days she needs a change of pace, she roams the halls of her mansion without aim. In her best moments, she jokes about how the corridors are dark and empty like her soul; in her worst, she can pass by window after window without seeing any of herself in the glass, though she hears the sounds of her own footsteps traveling along the floor in front of her. A reminder of who she is, and who she will continue to be.

Sometimes, Josephine wonders what she looks like right now. Has her skin paled a little more? Are her eyes redder? Can people tell the weight of all the lives that she’s forced to live just from looking at her? The last time she saw herself was a small photograph tucked away in one of her library’s many books, bent at the corner. How long ago was that? She thinks she still looked more human then. More color. A lot younger. The years hadn’t added up yet.

In a way, they never will again.

Later in the day, there is a golden light that invites her beyond the mansion walls. Josephine dons sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat before making her way outside. Leaning against a stone balcony, she watches as the sun bleeds shades of red and orange, slowly descending to meet the horizon with a kiss.

In the last eighty or so years she’s been alive, a lot of things have changed, but not this. It’s the same as in her youth: when she was a little girl, the proud daughter of a chaebol family, unafraid and eons more courageous than the adult who spends most of her days hiding within closed rooms. The sunset is as ageless and unchanging as she, older than she will ever be, and perhaps that’s why she always finds herself drawn out from her doors.

(And perhaps in that one small moment, she feels there is nothing wrong with permanence.)