Human Emotion

[Alex Macen 0]

Alex sat in his bed, restless.

 

A strange thing it is, to be El Aurian. We are a thoughtful race. Unlike the brute tactics of a human, as I've seen with some of the crewmates. We don't act upon suspicion, or think of life as this short lived hysteria that it must be. Along with this, millennium of living can alter one's personality many times over, yet certain traits remain the same. I've never met another El Aurian, whether he be eight, or eight hundred, that resorted to violence before negotiating, or talked before he thought. It seemed like an instinct, how we'd always be the listeners, accumulating those years of knowledge to create a result. It was almost robotic, how we never acted without assuming several scenarios, to plot the best course, to do what was best, not what was right or wrong.

 

This human emotion, these things that they are. We are well accustomed to them. El Aurians can love and hate as a human can, we just disregard it more often than them. Yet, I seemed to always be expressing emotion, contrary to an El Aurian thing. When we love, we do it with great compassion and rarely. The idea of living a long life stretches out the worry of reproduction, hence why you can be well into seven hundred come the first marriage. It wasn't like the Vulcans, where we could ignore it, emotion is apart of an El Aurian just as much as it is for a human, we just hold it back, rather ignore, until its truly necessary. Yet, I seemed to love the idea of only a hundred years to live. How thinks blink by, and how every moment must last, and be filled with - Ah, Why am I doing this? Why am I so angry? Even now as I speak this, why do I have such damn emotion!

 

The voice of his echoed, bouncing across the empty room, as noone was around to hear it but himself.

 

This is how it's always been, hasn't it. When the first crews came that I tagged along with, I was seen as a minor. I couldn't blame them either, being so naive for my age. They probably shrugged it off as natural, at least until it came time to leave. That was the first time they ever saw an El Aurian say no to an elder, and i'm sure it was their last. I said no, and I stayed, I continued to assimilate, and I continued to change. I am what I am now because of it. Why else would I be aboard this crew, this ship, risking my life not for El Auria, but for Earth. Had i switched sides some century ago and I was not aware? Or was I aware all along? These questions linger in my head, and I have no answer for them, noone does. I seem so childish to an El Aurian, and perhaps the same to everyone else. Where had that maturity gone? Where had the El Aurian traditions went? Where was my identity, at a bridge between one world and the next. Without a map to guide, and no idea which side would be for the best, and only having two choices: Right and Wrong.

 

In the eyes of anyone else, I'm having a mid-life crisis. But to an El Aurian, I've always been in a crisis.

Edited February 11, 2010 by Alex Macen