Thinking about how he’s the last surviving member of his tribe.
Thinking about how any language or dialect his tribe may have had, is lost forever. Ji’s mind is not meant to remember everything. They forget, and the longer they live, the less they remember their own culture.
He loses the dances his people used to perform. They can’t recall the sound of the music they played. Clothing, food, rituals, even the kind of incense they burned. All of it is gone.
Ji hates that it was him who got the curse of immortality, but I feel like part of that is because he isn’t anything special. It could have been anyone— a poet, a scholar, someone who could better represent the culture that inevitably eroded away with time. Someone who could keep their people alive in more than a literal sense.
But instead, it’s Ji. Unambitious, unremarkable Ji whose only virtue is their immortality. Ji, who can’t play an instrument when they find an old hymn from their tribe, still intact. Ji, who can’t even remember the feeling of their own language in their mouth.
The hollow pit that forms when you forget something that should never be forgotten.
