Impossible to know what time it is.
I’m one of the old people. There used to be a bright day and a dark night. Each morning, the sun would warm the horizon into a purple and orange butter when it rose, and it would glare into swords of radiance as it sunk into the west, streaming red and yellow fingers into the twilight. At night, a hypnotic indigo rested over us. Seemingly pinpricked by diamonds of pure white, so clarion and pristine as to inspire religions and draw our minds into it. A ribbon of beauty was the spine of the night. Flowing over the vastness, a milky-honey, a band of majesty to stir owls and to wonder us.
There was once a difference between the night and the day.
My eyes open to introduce me to another episode of the new real. I have slept but I have not rested. The ash has found the pockets of my nose and my lips. I spit and wipe my face. Everything I see is grey.
I never speak. Why would I?
The wind stinks like burning rubber and I’m exhausted. I stand, take two steps, and kneel down. I put my forehead into my fist and it feels cold. I close my eyes and I’m too dehydrated to cry. I listen to my ragged breath as microplastic particulate batters my skin. Memories flog my mind. Happy memories batter my sentience like a lash. My son learns to ride a bike, and I remember the explosion in Reno. My wife cooks my favorite meal, and she is carried off by bandits. My weakness, my impotence in the face of a cruel imitation of what my life once was. Impossible to know what time it is. I heave to breathe, my skeletal ribcage working to draw in this plastic/air mixture.
I crawl, as best I can, to a pile of refuse. It is a mixture of dirt, human bones, and unsold Oculus Rifts. I imagine this will be my pieta, cradled in the filth of the world that knew time. I snuggle up, nudging my head against the skulls of other old people. I try to think of last words, but they are all references. I can’t come up with any of my own.
And then I hear a sound
Something I’d lost long ago comes roaring back into me, it’s endorphins or love or humanity. I don’t know, much less care, what this could be. The sound is a song. It’s enveloping me. It’s ringing my veins and pulling me out of my death-stupor. It rears back and displays like a cobra and looks me in the eyes and commands that I have strength. The song locks into my soul and animates my fragile dust-skin body. I will walk. I will.
I will without time, without anyone to watch. And as almost all humans have walked, without time watching them, without a faint whisper to honor their names, without a gossamer of love to remember them by, I walk.
[If you want this to be a serious post, stop reading. if you want this to be funny, this is the song:]
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