For years, I'd sat on this old porch, swinging life away. Suburbia was a far cry from the locales that had spawned my existence. White picket fences, immaculate green lawns - hell, even I must be contributing to the stereotypes; an old man rocking away in his chair. For many, I suppose, suburbia represented an amalgam of everything they could've ever sought after - society, family, wealth. I, though, was the polar opposite. I sat on my porch not to indulge in the quaint little society that had been formed through back-breaking labour and visceral bloodshed. As I rocked, I cast my mind back years, decades, centuries. I stared off into hte clear sky, my mind apparently blank, except for my marvelling the natural aesthetic of the world.

My thoughts, however, were otherwise occupied. As I watched the bulbuous clouds hanging suspended in the inverted ocean of blue, my mind took me to places I hadn't envisioned for years. The same sky my eyes now bored into was the one Cortez has been beneath when he razed the world of the Aztecs. Bonaparte had meandered below it, as he soaked in all the natural beauty of the Parisian countryside. Breathing in the same air as I was now, Hitler and Churchill tossed millions of tonnes of steel toward each other, and millions of lives had been lost in the same sun my skin was now drinking in. These were all world-altering events, I knew, but I wouldn't trade my porch and my chair to return the globe to those comparably barbaric eras. Cortez, Napoleon, Caesar, Hitler, Churchill and I had all inhaled the same oxygen, experienced the same winds and been scorched by the same sun. Aside from the publicity of our endeavours, were Ghandi and I really so different?

Humanity, over the centuries, and millenia, has remained rather the same, I mused inwardly. If I had betray and murder me, surely I would have felt both emotional - guilt, sadness, perhaps vengeance? - and physical pain. As Brutus thrust his blade into the chest of his father, would Caesar have not felt the same? It seems indisputable. Were I to build a house, only to have it destroyed by flames, would not devastation grip my heart? As he watched his Reich fall, I'm sure Adolf felt similarly.

My eyes drifted downwards, to children playing across the street. Even in their youth, and happiness, I would not wish my plight upon them. One of the boys stopped playing, and sprinted across the bitumen to see me. I'd lived in the street for more years than he'd been alive, and had developed a strong friendship with his parents. I knew that, in time, I would have to sever those ties and move on, but my heart yearned to experience the present. I obliged, as the boy clambered onto my knee.
"Hello, Ben." I greeted him, a warm smile accompanying my words. An enthusiatic, "Hello!" was my response.
"I was looking at the sky again, today." I told him.
"Cool! What'd you see?"
"The usual."
The boy laughed. "Wouldn't it be cool to live forever? See the sky every day?"
His young, naive mind amused me, yet I was possibly the only person in the world capable of answering the question based on my experiences. Some of history's most powerful, most influential - greatest- men, had personally asked me the same question, in a multitude of languages. I voiced a false response to him, but silently, inwardly, responded with the truth.
No.