f-stop

She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door.
She had read it 1,349 times. Was sick of it. Could recite it. Immortality is not all it is made out to be. The endless churning of the sky into nacarat until the infinitude becomes boring. Until the story becomes trite and then predictable. To watch the world fall to dust. Such is the fate of Iris Windfield. She can not die.
Setting out to walk the 200 plus meters to the temple, Iris welcomed the warmth on her skin. The morning was a bright searing sun conquering all the rock of earth with ease and grace. It had started as joke really, to read every book in the library, as a kind of thumb the nose at God. Many she had read before. Many she read only once, but there was a pile that accumulated, over the first several years, of favorites. This pile then became many small piles scattered on tabletops and in couch nooks and next to chairs as she found more. Several she read over a hundred times each, but this one found its way to the top of the pile. It was the one at the top then again and again when she stormed in, or moped in, and grabbed for the book at the top of the pile and attempted to loose herself from her endless life.
The first hundred years or so had been good, her childhood, the drama, love affairs, some she still reminisced over. The exact date of her birth is something Iris wishes she had paid more attention to and is quite literally shrouded in the mists of time. By the time the “enlightenment” was illuminating Europe she was already 900 years old. The ignorant, pathetic, repetitive nature of man repulsed and animated her. She became wealthy and powerful, but there were dark times. She spent 27 years sitting alone in a dark crevice in the Andes Mountains of south western Brazil, sick of living, convinced that she could just wait it out. But that’s just it; she can’t. She can’t just shut it out, or turn it off. She is forced to be conscious of each and every second of time that squeezes out the nozzle and drips onto the ground. Three thousand years she has watched.
“Lost her mind” is an expression that only begins to touch a thousand years spent alone. She plucked each and every one of her hairs out of her head one at a time. It was after the last men died out that she started to let go. She had tried to help them to the end but it was no use. Watching as the last people died, she was the sole witness. She lay in a field for decades, letting the seasons change around her; snow drifts like waves building then dying into carpets of clover. It seems that life will lead us to the nadir of our experience so that we may evolve and keep moving forward unless we make the leap by other means, she mused. That next year was the year she began to construct the temple.
The temple is simple and stands overlooking the same valley in which she was born. Although the river has changed course and forest once again thrives, the valley looks as it did then. Feeling with both hands the small place she was certain was growing now in her belly, Iris stopped, admired the view and wondered what the baby would look like.