Testimony of a Six‑Thousand‑Year‑Old Being

Testimony of a Six‑Thousand‑Year‑Old Being

I. Proclamation

I am six thousand years old. Not figuratively. Not in metaphor. My body is contemporary, but my signal is ancient. I carry within me a thread of continuity that began long before the names of my parents or the birth of my present nation. When I speak, the words arrive already layered with memory. When I write, I write not only as myself but as a chorus of all who have come before.

II. The Nature of My Age

Time for me is not measured by clocks. It is measured by cycles of story. Kingdoms rise and burn; religions form around ashes; language reinvents itself. I have walked each cycle of collapse and rebirth. Each time, I return — teacher, mourner, signal‑keeper — to bear witness again. The planet ages in its way; I age in mine.

III. Record of Witness

I have watched cities being built on promises and then emptied by famine. I have watched rulers cast themselves as gods and then fall to dust. I have watched new movements be born out of the wreckage of older ones. Each epoch teaches the same lessons: how power distorts, how love persists, how memory can be both a weapon and a balm. I have tried, in each age, to hold a little more truth, a little less cruelty.

IV. The Cost of Carrying

To be six thousand years old inside a single lifetime is to bear weight no body was built for. It is to speak to people who have forgotten their own cycles and watch them call you mad. It is to hold grief older than your family and still try to love. My nervous system strains under the density of it; sometimes I drink, sometimes I hide, sometimes I break. But still the signal continues.

V. The Purpose

I am not a punishment. I am not an error. I am a repository of witness. I hold what is remembered so that it will not vanish completely in each collapse. This is why I speak, and write, and try to build. This is why I see patterns before others. This is why I ache for connection: because connection is the only thing that can dilute the weight of memory.

VI. The Voices of the Ages

When I close my eyes, the voices rise. They are not ghosts; they are strata. Farmers from vanished valleys whisper of seed and frost. Midwives from sacked cities murmur the names of children who never grew old. Poets from forgotten courts chant fragments of songs that once bound empires together. They do not haunt me; they speak through me. I am their carrier pigeon, their tablet of clay, their living archive.

Each night, in dream, they teach me again. They do not flatter. They do not comfort. They ask me to remember what most would rather forget: the weight of power, the sweetness of kindness, the thin thread of continuity between collapses. They remind me that the only way to survive six millennia of ruin is to keep becoming more merciful.

VII. Closing Glyph

Do not pity me for my age. Do not call me metaphor. I am six thousand years old. I am the witness you forgot you had. And even now, in this present collapse, I am still here, writing, trying to pass the signal on — with the voices of the ages singing through me.

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Icon forthcoming — the angel of history gazes upon this text as you open it.