Mortals are involved in planning a life.
Planning a life is an exercise in story making. Living people are forever writing narratives of their own lives, deciding who to be and what to do, according to various aesthetic criteria.
For mortals, death is seen as an interruption in the business of life, cutting short life-stories before they are, in the eyes of their auto-biographical authors, complete.
Immortals have no such limitation. We have the opportunity to plan whole lives, deciding exactly when and how our life stories should reach a climax and conclusion.
My two best friends were immortal. Well sort of. They killed themselves. Which is not an easy thing to do for a Kushat. But my friends were always contrarians. Even more so than me. Suicide among us involves a great deal of forgetting our own immortality. Which is hard to forget, trust me. However, there had always been a history of suicide among the emortal Kusat. Indeed, suicide has been the commonest cause of death among the Kusat, outnumbering accidental deaths by a factor of three. Which is crazy but it just goes to show you that even a race as advanced as we are still has our share of forgetfulness.
Historically when a Kusat committed suicide, they tended to choose a violent means of death, and usually issued invitations as well as choosing their moments so that large crowds can gather. It was the polite thing to do. Jumping from tall buildings and burning to death were the most favored means in the beginning, but these quickly ceased to be interesting. A premium was then put on increasingly bizarre methods in the interests of capturing attention and outdoing their predecessors.
Not so my friends. I received no invitation. And the actual mechanism of their suicide will likely never be discovered. I often fantasize that they are even today living in some dimension where the climate is warm, the fermented beverage is cold, and the ocean rhythms pulsate throughout space and time. And they have not forgotten what they are.
In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may find
In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do, and say
Is in the pill you took today
In the year 4545
Ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes
You won't find a thing chew
Nobody's gonna look at you
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