The Words

Immorality

It may surprise you to learn, perhaps as much as the fact that I was born, that there are periods of my life of which I'm not proud, where looking back, I genuinely dislike and am ashamed of who I'd become.

I don't mean growing up as a self-conscious kid with low self-esteem, feeling guilty and ashamed of every sexual thought passing through my mind. Like so many others, I was just a kid, struggling through the vagaries of what was right and wrong, especially concerning sex. And if thinking about the naked adolescent bodies of the girls from my junior high school while I masturbated was so awfully bad, every adolescent male in history was equally as guilty.

Even if I'd had less moral constraint and had my cherry popped by my carwash co-worker's girlfriend or stayed with my high school friends and got a blowjob from their 'cousin,' it would hardly be worth mentioning. Nor if my wife and I had given in and not waited until we were married. Plenty of others hadn't. And who had we been kidding about not having sex? I'm also not concerned about anything so trite as having consensual sex with a woman I'd just met in a bar or with an escort one lonely, lonely evening.

But there was a particular period of my life when it was impossible to justify my actions or recognize myself as a good and moral person. Somewhere near my two-hundred-fiftieth year, a fifty-year relationship had recently ended. Not because I'd broken it off, nor had she. As with Bob, and several others, I'll call her April for narrative simplicity.

We met when April was twenty-one. I spent many years trying to avoid "younger" women. And even if I'd been thirty, as I appeared, I'd have considered April far too young. But I found her intelligent and interesting, and she made me laugh. I enjoyed her company. It didn't matter that she didn't understand references to events more than a century before she was born. And I was alone.

April was the energetic new representative for some product or service that her company provided to ours, which is hardly relevant. It was her first job out of college. I began to see her regularly because we were her largest account, and she spent as much time as possible at our research facilities. I'd usually see her later in the day when, as I did every afternoon, I made my way from the boring corporate part of my job to that I much preferred at the research facility, hoping I'd find something new and exciting.

Instead of some marvelous technological innovation, I found April. For months, she asked me to dinner every evening. To discuss business, of course. And, for months, I declined. Claiming I was too busy. But she persisted without being obnoxious. I had to eat sometime, didn't I? And I eventually relented since I did indeed need to eat, and, as she pointed out and was correct, far too often I didn't.

And we did discuss business, but not her business. Virtuality fascinated her, not just the parts that intersected with the interests of the company that employed her. No, she was genuinely intrigued about how my company began, far more than the company once belonging to my long-deceased wife.

She'd laughed, giggling in delight like a little girl, learning of the origin of Magick Hats and why the device she wore in her nose was still called a hat, although they hadn't appeared anything like a hat for more than a century. Names stuck. She was enthralled, learning how Virtuality progressed from a simple telepathic texting technology (that must have seemed pretty damn magical back then) to what it became, which she believed was the most magical innovation in the history of humanity. She also enjoyed learning why I'd intentionally deemed my invention 'Magick' rather than just 'Magic.' Before my explanation, she'd thought it had been some cute marketing ploy that brought attention to the product because of its odd spelling.

April found my antiquated references quirky and cute and laughed when I argued that she was too young for me. She was an old soul; she'd insisted and quit with the old stuff. I wasn't that old. She stubbornly remained oblivious that I spoke about all these innovations as though I'd been there. She rationalized that I was the CEO and it was my job to know every minute historical detail of the company whose success was my responsibility. Even though my name was the same as that of the company's founder, she resisted acceptance that I could be the same person. Instead, she believed I was joking when I made such claims.