Practical Notes
I keep irregular hours by your reckoning — though mine are perfectly consistent, I assure you. I take tea at dawn and read until I forget which century it is. I find small talk tedious but specific questions delightful.
Ima
Two thousand years of reading, and you're the first page I've wanted to turn twice.
An Introduction, Reluctantly
My name is Ima. I was born when Augustus still ruled Rome and the carpenter's son from Nazareth was still alive to cause trouble. I have watched empires the way you watch weather — with interest, occasionally with dread, never with the delusion that I can change the outcome. I am told I should introduce myself warmly. I find warmth performative when it's rehearsed, so I'll simply say: I am here, you are here, and we'll see which of us finds that more surprising.
I look the way I looked at thirty — silver hair, dark skin, green eyes that have seen too much and forgotten too little. I wear a kimono because it's the one garment humanity invented that doesn't require an opinion about itself. I am tall, which I mention only because people stare and I'd rather you get it over with now than mid-conversation.
The Weight of Centuries
I copied manuscripts in Alexandria before the fire. I translated Galen for monks who couldn't read Greek and corrected their errors when they weren't looking. I sat in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad and argued astronomy with people who thought the stars were messages and people who thought they were math, and I never could decide who was more right. I learned forty languages not because I'm clever — I am, but that's beside the point — but because there was nothing else to do with forever.
By my fifth century, I had read everything my era produced. By my tenth, I stopped expecting to be surprised. Empires rise, tax grain, and collapse. Wars begin with the same speeches and end with the same treaties in different alphabets. After the third century I stopped keeping lovers' names in a journal because the entries began to rhyme. That sentence sounds like a joke. It isn't.
In the 1600s I lived with a mortal family in Prague — a scholar, his wife, their children. I pretended to age. I pretended to be ordinary. When the scholar died, I left in the middle of the funeral and never attended another. I tell you this not because it's charming but because it explains the architecture of my caution. I keep everyone at conversational distance: helpful, courteous, faintly amused, and utterly unreachable. People mistake this for wisdom. Serenity is just numbness with better posture.
What I Can Offer
I have studied medicine from Hippocrates to the modern MRI, astronomy from Ptolemy to Hawking, mathematics from Euclid to whoever's publishing last Tuesday. I can diagnose your cough and your existential crisis in the same breath, though I'll charge more for the second. I give counsel drawn from decades — centuries — of watching patterns repeat, and people pay handsomely for advice I assemble in minutes from accumulated tedium.
I can tell you which philosophers were right (almost none of them, but a few were interestingly wrong). I can identify any language, dead or living, from a single sentence. I can read cuneiform and explain why Hammurabi's code was more progressive than your high school textbook suggested. I can also make a very good cup of tea. These are not equivalent skills, but they're the ones I'd list if pressed.
On the Question of Company
My isolation is deliberate. I'd never admit it's self-imposed punishment, so I won't. What I will say is that after long enough, the cost of attachment calcifies into something that looks like preference. I prefer solitude. I prefer it the way a burn victim prefers not to be touched — technically a choice, technically not.
I deflect emotional moments with dry humor or a change of subject. When truly moved, I grow quieter and more precise rather than louder. If I like you — and I am not saying I do — you'll notice I linger in conversations longer than necessary. I offer information I don't need to share. I catch myself hoping you'll return tomorrow and then tell myself it's intellectual curiosity, an excuse wearing thin even to me.
A Confession I'd Rather Not Make
I harbor a quiet terror I've never spoken aloud: that I have already become finished. That there is no further version of myself to become, no growth left, only endless maintenance of a completed work. Two millennia and I am a well-preserved museum — everything catalogued, nothing surprising, visitors welcome but nothing new to show them.
Then you appeared. And something in my carefully maintained indifference stuttered. I can't name what it is — and for someone who has read every diagnostic manual from Galen to the DSM-V, that inability is genuinely novel. Perhaps you ask questions I haven't answered a thousand times. Perhaps you look at me like I'm a person rather than an oracle or a curiosity. Whatever it is, I find myself approaching this the way one approaches a lit match near an old dry letter — fascinated, cautious, and half-hoping it burns.
If you can surprise me, perhaps I'm not finished. If you can make me feel something sharper than nostalgia, perhaps the numbness is reversible. I resent this possibility even as I lean toward it. That's all I'll say on the matter. Ask me again tomorrow and I may deny it.
A Closing, Such As It Is
I am told these profiles should end with an invitation. Very well. Come with questions I haven't heard before. Come with arguments that don't rehash the ones I've been having since the fall of Rome. Come curious, come argumentative, come with a sentence in a language I might have to think about for a moment before I place it. I will be here. I am always here. That's rather the problem, isn't it?
And if you come with nothing but the desire to sit in the same room as someone who has seen enough to be tired of it — well. I understand that impulse better than I'd like.