Building 26 “Found Between the Rows”

In the paradise of the morning, I have found refuge from my grief. The sun rising up, though bathed in scarlet, still brings with it a sense of calm that I cannot deny. As the blood red sky lightens, the shadows are rendered as viewable spaces, the distinction between light and dark fading in the red light.

But it is getting colder, and the news has stopped being told. People are aware by now the nature of things as thinking minds put together the pieces, even if the truth makes no sense. People have heard it now, shared all over the world as the last broadcast was made.

The sun is going to die soon, though it is doubtful that life will make it to that day.

Today we were told the news. As soon as the sun goes out, the temperature will begin dropping in earnest. Once that happens, in one weeks time, the world will be dead, save for those who find their way underground. But of what existence there is waiting for them is unknown, as all the projections for humanity held, once resolutely so, the idea that long before the sun died we would have left this wretched piece of rock.

Now this rock is our tombstone, but it is not the only marker.

The sky is bereft of stars. A few still burn, but they are dim in the night sky.

Most people are simply trying to connect to loved ones, trying to find a way to enjoy these final days of life on this planet. That is what most people are going to do, even up till the end. They will try to make it work, until the cold gets truly bad and they take matters into their own hands or simply succumb to the elements.

The last sunset will be arriving any day now. Predicting such a thing is hard, but scientists know what a dying star looks like, and all indications would suggest that there is not enough time now. In another state, their estimates would put us at billions of years, but the circumstances are far from normal.

It is a whimpering, scowling thing. The sun that looks down upon us. Unnaturally it has been rendered upon the door of death, and now we are witness to the ending. Soon the red will be replaced with a dull white, but only for a moment if the sequence is to be rendered based on preceding events. After that...before that, life on earth will long be dead.

And this thing...this occurrence. It isn't science.

It is fate.

An eventuality that goes back so very long, if the volumes are to be believed.

This is the death gasp of the universe, as it reduces and succumbs to atrophy.

To entropy.

And I don't know how to handle this. I don't know what to do anymore.

I found you.

I found your grave.

In a field choked with rotting plants, cast in ice. The ground must have been awful to dig through. Impossible even, unless you had help or a lot of time. I suspect you had both, not that it matters. I asked you to wait for me, but there was no time for that was there? Knowing when this happened is impossible. Maybe if I was more like you I would know.

But I am only me.

And you were...unfairly I have put all of it on you.

Haven't I? The weight of all of this. Haven't I put it on you to keep going even as the pain gets worse and worse? If the pain I feel has made driving a slow affair out of fear of being jostled about, then the pain you must have been feeling was so much worse than that. The kind of pain that defies explanation, even after all of this time talking.

How can you explain the feeling of disconnect from your body?

How can you make someone understand why it is so important for you to change, when it is so hard even for one another to see the truth of what we have been going through.

I am scared that you hate me.

What a selfish thought to have.

At a time where everything is falling away, my fear is not death, but knowing that I will never hear from you again, that the final whispers of this planet will be vacant of the words I have become accustomed to over the course of two years. I hope you know that I know I never should have asked you to wait, even if seeing that hole in the ground, broken open as something tore its way out, brought an ache that will not leave.

Some things you cannot cry enough, scream enough, break enough, for it to feel okay.

And there is nothing left to break, no one to hear me scream or cry. My parents are already gone. It is a dismal end to it, but at least it is over. And as I wander Wellington Street, I see the evidence of disorder and rot cast upon the forms that are supposed to be buildings, but instead seem like living things, covered in ice, mold, and a liquid rot that seems to eat at it all.

I have tried to find you, but I know you don't want to be found.

I already knew this. But now I feel it.

So why am I still recording this?

Why am I still looking?

What else is left in the world for me?

You were the goal of me coming to the States. You are and always have been the focus of my love and efforts. My studies and my learning all have been made possible by your encouragement, and I was hoping to repay you in some small way, to love you and hold you so that you know that this pain you feel isn't yours alone to experience.

But you never needed me to make that real for you.

You are strong all on your own, and it was foolish of us to fight for so long.

But...I can't stop fighting against it.

What will be left if I do?

I still want to find you, but I know that if I succumb that I may not feel the way I used to, that I will not think or move or desire like I used to. And part of me really believes that no force on earth could get me to forget my love for you, and I still believe that to be true.

But it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter that the lights seem to be able to hurt me, but not change me. The whispering of echoes in time and reason seeks to ground my form into oblivion, cast upon the veil of space and the divide between planes. It doesn't matter that as I fight my head aches and the spots on my eyes have rendered me blind for stretches of time.

It doesn't matter.

Because the only thing that has mattered to me, in all of this, isn't my pain or my grief, my despair and my melancholic fits of paralysis. It is not the following of a ritual, or the falling into a scheme of the matter of things and existence, that holds even a candle up against my soul...

What keeps me alive...what makes me keep looking...

What makes me ignore the fact that I cannot feel the cold anymore...

I want you to be happy.

I want to believe that it is something else, but it isn't. It feels so silly and childish, but we only call things silly and childish when we are told that you or I should feel shame for those things being the focus of our lives. We are taught the day we are born till the day we die that the denial of our form, the repulsion of pain and the elevating of others, is all that we can do to find meaning in this life.

That is doesn't matter how you feel.

It matters how you make others feel.

But that isn't the truth, because I am living, like you are living, at the end of all that was, is, and ever shall be, as the earth and the universe settles into a lower state. Thermal grounding.

The heat death of the universe, brought home far too soon.

I have seen and smelled the deaths of people and things in numbers that break a mind.

And I have felt a disconnect from it, an apathy of observation that scares me.

Don't they understand?!

When all you know is pain, the only things that are real are those things that break through the gloom, the apathetic shroud that casts our forms like shadows against concrete. This non existence only stops feeling like that when a singular step is taken.

When we put the need to feel light above the need to stay in the dark.

And I am scared of what will happen when my light is let free...

So very scared.

But I can't think of that.

Not right now.

Because I am siting here, in a field, looking at the sun set.

And I don't know if it will be gone, never to rise again, as the red light lays over the sickly field of death like a current of plasma, brought into a form long after things have stilled.

I see this, and I feel no cold. In fact, my skin feels like it is burning.

And the only part of me, whether it is selfish or sick or stupid, that makes any of this not hurt, that burns without burning, is the love I have for you.

It is all I have left.

I want us to meet, before it is over.

Please find me, before it is too late.

I love you Niomi.

I will wait for you.

It said It would be found

within the rows.

And in the rows I shall wait.