I won an eon once.

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      It was a prize for a game well played. A turn of luck for someone like me, a few risky gambles and particularly skilled gambits led to me winning an entire eon for myself. To put into perspective how much I won, an eon is 1,000,000,000 years. To place that in perspective, were I to win that all in seconds, that's about 31 years. Really, I had a new lifetime comparable to mountains instead of people.

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      I had so many plans then.

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      The first millenniums were fairly eventful. Love, War, Peace, Life, Birth, Hate, and many, many fascinations. Some are rather embarrassing in retrospect, I spent almost a thousand years trying to solve the mysteries of existence by meditation and silence. Then another millennium trying to solve them with parties and drugs. I had a rather despotic phase, evil minions, big cloak, etc. It's rather silly, but I still try on the cape sometimes to enjoy the mystique of it. I even re-used it for my more heroic vigilante stuff, they've even named that style of cloak after me in some systems.

 

      Of course, I fell in love with everyone. I also made love with some other people in a more casual sense, but it'd be rude to get into further detail. Even if they are all long, long, long, long dead by now. I still have some relations with their descendants, and would rather prevent those sorts of details from being so widely spread.

 

      I never stopped loving. It did hurt for a while, watching everyone fade away. But, I got over it in only a couple hundred years. You start being numb to the pain after the first couple thousand, yet the joys in each of those loves still warm me to this day. Each friendship was easily worth more than their resulting death. It's hard to not get attached to all the joys of humanity.

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      In particular, I remember one relationship I had.

 

      I'll note here that I'm not talking about one unique person. After a while, it's hard for anyone to be unique. I usually meet about 10 new people every century, and I don't meet in a casual sense, I mean I meet and become close friends with them from their young adulthood to their deaths. I have had 6 million of these "deep-friendship" relationships.

      I've never been the most social sort.

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      You quickly start to get a feeling for what relationships can exist between humans. Some are complex intellectual and emotional sparring, others are simple and warm, others are unexpected. And although finding a soulmate is rare, I have had about 30 deep, instant connections. Which is rather lucky from my perspective, although I guess there's no good way to measure that.

 

      Yet, those aren't the most memorable. What I remember the clearest is the brief, shallow meetings of someone, before I lose them forever. That one sided relationship is unforgettable. I simply can't let them go. It's the fleeting nature of it that made me write it out. I feel that they should live beyond me.

 

      I was once chatting with a dashing woman while walking out of the hoverport, it was raining, and I was rather miserable in the thunderstorm. It must have been when I was young, maybe only ~70,000 years old, so I'd forgotten to bring an umbrella. At this point I was living as a middle-class worker under a rather terrible boss. It was an interesting phase for how miserable and banal it was.

 

      The pavement had degraded quite significantly. At the time, we still had some amount of scarcity, and matter-fabrication was still a couple centuries off. Instead, the pavement was made of that planet's stone, crushed and mixed into a plaster to smoothen streets. The deep purple dye applied to it hid all the cracks and imperfections already forming.

 

       The rain was so loud, the pavement was acting like a drum, and I was still wearing my formal sandals. She offered to share with me her umbrella, a rather nice gesture for a complete stranger. She was young, especially for the time. Her name was pretty common then, and she wore a similarly formal dress as mine, if not nearly as soaked.

     

      I accepted, and made some joke about how I hoped to get home safe. She made some joke about that rain that I had only heard a few thousand times.

 

      She was pretty funny.

 

      We were struck by lightning moments later, only an inch away from me. She was burned, deafened, and hit the ground head first. The smell of roast flesh floated through the rain. Sloughed off bits stained the pavement. Her device signaled for help, the loud tone demanding attention.

The rain drowned it out, I could only faintly hear it echo from the hollow, now bright red floor.

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      I was stunned.

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      Not physically, of course. That wasn't really in the cards for me. I just didn't expect it, it must have been the first real surprise I had that decade. I stood there as she was rushed to the hospital, I never returned the umbrella.

 

      She lived for only a couple more years, although it was hard to connect with her afterwards. It never felt right to show up. You see, I was untouched, only some slight ringing in my ears, but otherwise I was completely unharmed. Folashade never really recovered.

      I was never able to be carefree with her again. Maybe I should have.

 

      I don't remember what I did with the umbrella afterwards. I know it's safe, somewhere. Maybe it's in a museum? I don't travel in the rain much anymore.

 

      I don't hold on too much, at least not for very long. One time, I did a quick estimate of how many pairs of socks I had owned. I always buy very high-quality items, so my nice synthetic gel-smoothed cuttlefish skin socks are rather luxurious. Assuming I had only ever worn those for this entire time (which I certainly had not, I only found these a couple thousand years ago), each pair lasting 7 years, I have worn about a hundred times more pairs of socks than I've had those deep friendships.

I am not a very social person.

 

      I told this fact to someone quite recently, and they mentioned that I had likely spent more time inside of the tiny specialty shop where I buy my pretty socks than I had ever spent having sex in my 7 million years of life. I fear they might be right, so I haven't taken the time to check.

 

      I probably shouldn't have said that, but you know, old people love to ramble.

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      Huh, I'm being told that I've run out of time for this, so.

 

      And, I'd like to thank the staff at Ichkula Elementary for inviting me to speak, and a special shout-out to my grand^126 child, Sasi, for having her sixth birthday recently!

 

      I love you so much.