Narrow Horizons

What is hope? Is hope always a dream of change? Perhaps it is, but the change does not necessarily have to be in the world around us. Sometimes the change can be inside, too.

Usually, the hope is both, and we just fail to recognize its second existence. 

Transcript

I remember the day the sky fell. It’s almost as clear as ever. Crystalline. Glinting. Shining in the light, even though there is no light now to see. 

I remember the moment the ground rushed forward to meet it. Every thing. Every sound. Crunch. Gone.

I remember thinking I was an idiot. I remember sitting there in stunned silence. I remember dying.

I remember looking around the room that I’d carved out for myself in utter disgust. 

I remember… because there was never anything for me to do but to remember. To catalog, eat my memories. Again and again and again and again.

I remember, because I had consigned myself, I felt, to being a thing of the past and nothing more. Just. A has been. A thing that worked for a world that had disappeared as quickly as steam evaporated from the shower mirror. 

I remember thinking I was both a genius and the world’s greatest moron. Of course I was smart. I had done what I could to preserve myself, my mind, my body, from a force unconquerable, a thing unknowable. Who else could say that. 

Of course I was an idiot. I’d been high the entire time. I wouldn’t have listened otherwise. Who listens to voices from the sky? It would have been one of them. One of their tricks. 

And their tricks were always to be listened to. Even though the great forces of immortality had run them from our fields and back behind their precious walls. Even then. 

Even then. 

Of course I was stupid. Because instead of annihilation I had this. This room. These memories. And what would I do with those things? What would my essence be? Regret.

It wasn’t like regret wasn’t already my essence to begin with. I’d already regretted my failures. Plenty of them. Not turning up to my sister’s funeral. Signing the servitude contract in her place, just to see her sign it after me. Double the money. Double the inheritance for whoever was left. I regretted not burning down the funeral home while they were still inside of it. I regretted, of course, burning it down while I was inside of it. I regretted doing that for decades. Each moment. Every second. 

Even with my body back, even with my soul, erm… mostly back? I had no idea how that worked, nor did I think I ever would. But even with the full canvas of life laid before me once again, all I produced was regret. Regret that I was too stupid to state my case. Regret that I could not get the others to believe me. Regret that not only did my compatriots not understand that the Easterlings had the magic to purge death from our lives, but that we should pursue it for all our generations of slaves, and…

And then, even when that entire society was gone, when very atmosphere fell frozen to the ground and everyone choked to death, where every undead servant would lay down to disappear into dust with no master to give them commands, I still felt regret. As though it would have mattered, really, if I had been able to change anything. Even if everyone had listened, this would still have been the best outcome. That I would have been blazed out of my mind the moment the strangers descended from the stars so that I heeded their warning.

Insane.

That was what my life was. Insane. Colorful. And now nothing more than bitter. I was supposed to exist in all times. That was what the long, cold darkness had taught me. And yet, I was still entrapped in it. In the past. Only the past. Looking back. Dreaming of realities that weren’t, that could not be. And where was I? If I looked so deeply backwards, where was forward? Did it even exist?

I had died once. I was reminded of that fact every single day when I woke up, that irrepressible itch lining my lungs. Even the Easterlings’ science couldn’t drive that tragedy out of me. All for nothing. They found her bones anyways. And with my bones left on the site, it was an open and shut case. Our parents received none of the servitude insurance money. Nothing. 

Work. Work. Feel as though you are watching your own body. Be nothing without the pleasure of feeling it. Feel the thing you were in the past. Feel it rip and tear and be humiliated. Watch it make your fellows weaker, for they never learn the struggle of work. Watch the world mean nothing. It just. Was. 

I had died once. I had died once, and was eventually going to do it again. It wasn’t nearly as traumatic as I had expected. Well, I mean, it was traumatic. Especially the very beginning of it, when all my senses were still online. It took just a couple of minutes for them to blissfully fade away. The sting, the burn, the smoke, they became as nothing faster than the core of my consciousness. Closer to the end, it was almost like a dream. There was this song. This beautiful, haunting song. Things that were close to words that I felt like I could understand and different, instruments I’d never heard, and a melody that would have brought me to tears, had I the eyes to cry with. 

I had died once. I could die again. The only thing that was holding me back were the stupid endorphins that were coursing around my blood. Well, them, and logic. I had enough food to last three more weeks, and enough water, too. I could wait that much time to see what had become of the world. I should, in fact. I needed to be patient. After all, the very atmosphere had frozen. Were the heaters in my little hideyhole the only things that allowed me to breathe? 

I had died once. I could die again. What was the point in waiting? Every second was a punishment I levied on my myself. A punishment I didn’t deserve. Twenty odd years I had lived as a being of the past. I could not stand three more weeks.

Twenty years. And yet I balked at three weeks. Insane. Madness. 

Three weeks of stewing in my regrets. Regrets I harbored for a world that could never cry for me, nor would it. Three weeks, or death. 

My hand wrapped around the door handle. It was warm. The entire room was warm. It was warmer than it had been at the start. On the first day, in fact, I could hardly stand by the door for the deathly chill that leaked in from beyond. Now it was just a mild cooling wind. At least, that’s what I told myself it felt like. 

It was warmer, wasn’t it? 

Wasn’t it?

I had died once. I could die again.

I didn’t want to die again. 

It wasn’t so bad, right? That had been me, right? It was me who was forming these thoughts in my head, right? Right? 

I didn’t know. I had remembered the pain. The song, too. But the pain had been very, very real. For a moment that seemed to stretch on for months, it was the only thing. So what if that moment was really just a blip in time? When I looked at it from the present, it was that. It slotted into its moment in time, and was nothing more. Then when I opened back up that memory, when I felt the itch in my lungs…

I didn’t want to die. There was a very good chance that I would if I opened the door. Each minute I waited was a minute that the odds I would live when that handle was turned went up. So what if I stewed in my regrets in a tiny bunker? So what? Did I somehow think that the Easterlings had survived the strangers? That they would render life back into my corpse once again as a exercise of pride? No. Stupid. I was stupid.

I would regret outside, too. I would. No one lived out there, that much was clear. Nothing above ground could have survived the atmosphere freezing. I would see a husk of the world I had loved and hated in equal measure, and be almost as helpless as I was now, pacing and vacillating down below the surface. 

I could wait. I would wait. I had run out of things to pass the time. I couldn’t even sleep. But it was my entire life that was on the line. My entire…

 I remembered the song they had sung as I died, remembered how much I wanted to weep and scream as I was pulled away from it to be bound to my scorched husk of a body. It wasn’t all that bad. Either side. So perhaps just this once I would never have anything to regret, ever again. Perhaps there wasn’t edible food out there. Perhaps…

Perhaps my hand was on the door handle. It was cold. Not as cold as it had been, certainly. I had my jacket on. I had more over there in a pile in the corner. I was going to have to open the door at some point.

So I did. 

A great wave of frigid air battered me. But that was it. I could breathe. I could see. There it was. The little stairwell that led out to the rest of the world. To a world that was dead, that I had given up on.

It was cold. Very, very cold. I was uncomfortable every second of it. But this discomfort wasn’t something I could regret. At least, it didn’t feel like something I could. It just was. 

I walked up the stairs, two at a time. My legs trembled from the stress. After all, if they didn’t listen to me they could be saving my life. Their lives, if we could consider legs to have lives. 

My body wanted to listen to my legs’ apprehension. Every piece of my flesh followed in suit, landing just at the edge of rebellion. My fingers trembled, my teeth ached, my temples throbbed. If only they possessed that one spark of will, the one and only thing I held dominion over, they would have stopped me.

But we kept walking. Centimeter by centimeter. The air was growing colder, but I could feel the warmth in my body rage in protest against it. The chill wasn’t so great that the flame of my life would flicker out. It was okay. It was alright. It was fine.

It was swell? I was running out of terms to boost my morale. I’d once prided myself on my skill over language. I’d prided myself on a lot of things. So many things. And yet I had taken all those marvels I had performed, the miracles I had dreamed of making, and turned them all into regret, into pain, into protest. That and nothing more. The only solution was to go forward. To keep walking. Despite it all. Despite the pain.

Colder, colder. My breath condensed before me in great wisps of white. The air was dry. It made sense. It was a consequence of their power. Frozen, thawing, gone. 

I had made it to the top of the steps, to the door that was bolted shut. Why had I bolted it? 

I knew why I bolted it. I didn’t like the reason. I had pictured hordes of screaming people. We would always do anything to avoid our death, even sell our bodies and soul to slavery. So they too would pay whatever price had to be paid to enter my solitary sanctum. The price would have been my flesh, my blood. Ripped, torn. Dead.

And I paid in my own way, too. I imagined scratch marks on the other side of the hatch. So many people who had tried, so many people who hadn’t believed when they should. Dead. For what reason? 

They never explained. The demons of the universe loved to try to articulate what they were doing, but it was always gobbledegook. Mush. Oh yes, we’d steal your older brother to the thaumaturgical school because he was especially proficient at spelling bees as a child. We need smart people at the head society, whether they have the free will to decide to be at that head or not. Of course, we bring the dead to life to work in place of the living because they cannot complain, and the idyllic world created by that slavery breeds a citizen unwilling to challenge or question the method by which they get their delicious sodas and palatial estates. We need order more than anything, after all. Certainly, we descended from the heavens to freeze your planet to death because we were incapable of understanding your interactions with this ‘holy’ world. That which is incomprehensible must be destroyed. Order. Peace. Prosperity. Built on a mountain of genocide and lies.

That was always how it was. Here, there, anywhere. I’d had weeks to come to terms with the fact that everyone I’d known was dead. Heck, I’d had decades to come to terms with the fact that most of my friends and family were deceased, and that had been a while ago. 

And now I had to come to terms with the fact that I’d probably been party to the death of someone out there. A leathery new corpse with blood on their fingernails, a look of shock, horror, and rage forever emblazoned on their face. I could have taken them in. Screw the logisitics of it all. I could have taken somebody, anyone in. I could have done better to get everyone else to listen. Not just to the threat, but…

There I was, dwelling once again in the morass of the past, with my future lying right in front of me. It was cold. The future, the past, whatever, whichever. Both. The present, too. Cold. 

I swapped the first latch to the left. The second to the right. Then I cajoled the little twisty knob at the bottom to slide counterclockwise. There was a creak, a crack, and then a tiny stream of dust fell into my face. 

Not dust. Sand. Sand as far as the eye could see. Sand in the streets, on the rooftops, in the clouds, at least it seemed that way. And not a single sound but the quick buzzing of the wind.

It was over. They’d been right. 

I looked back to the hatch. There weren’t any claw marks. It had been too fast. Too… tremendous. 

I couldn’t do anything but sigh. It really was going to be nothing but a prison of regrets. Above or below. Regrets about a universe I never even had the power to change. 

So I started walking. Walking to where, for what, I didn’t know. Even as I glanced up at the pale blue sky, the horizons felt far too narrow.

I would make them wider, somehow. Someway. I wouldn’t live long enough to regret failing this one last time.