Museum “The Exhibit”

What is left to say? I have tried to find you. I have looked in all the places you should be, if you are wanting to be found. But the more I search, the further I have had to drive in order to find new places to look. To locate more people to talk to, who may have seen you or something like you. And so few of these people want to speak to me.

So many places don't answer the door.

I won't stop looking, but it has been four weeks now. I filed a report with the police for all the good it would do. The cops are overwhelmed right now. It seems you going missing is just one in many. But they aren't really disappearing. They are dying, and when they die it is left to the living to try and find out what happened.

And I want to know what happened to you, though I know I may not like the answer.

I even went to your work the other day. The building was vacant, and I had expected there to be a lock on the door, but to my surprise it was open and so I went inside to look around. If visiting with your father was a long shot, then trying to find you at the very place where so much hurt was put upon you was the definition of madness.

Still I went inside.

I wanted to find you, and I wanted to see the exhibit.

The museum smelled just like you had described it, of mold and cold wood, dank musty tombs and the unmistakable scent of old electric light. The glow...of the bulbs...Shortly after we started talking you shared with me the nightmare of the man in a theater. He had dreamed about a being made of blinding light. An entity that smells of batteries...

It took so much to not tell you then and there. Honestly I don't know why I didn't. I think maybe it was because we didn't really know one another yet. Not well anyway. And I had been trained over the years to keep that part of me a secret. It was the thing I wasn't supposed to talk about, because whenever I did people just thought I was being weird.

And I hate feeling weird.

I know that I failed you when I did that, when you mentioned it again and again, only for me to say nothing. If anyone was going to understand, it was you, and instead of trusting that I hid it until there was no time at all.

And I went and saw the exhibit, even though I was looking for you. I couldn't help it. I had to know why I feel the calling. And when I found the exhibit, I read the letter, even though over the years I have read it again and again, hoping for an explanation. But there is no clue to be found there.

There is only suffering.

The pain of the sting I feel against my eyes, the way there are spots in my vision that have an imprint upon them. Oh I thought I was clever, hiding my pain in random reports, but really I am not. I waited and waited and ignored the thrumming, terrible humming, growing in my head. It is the sound of whispers, and of the movement of the sun.

There was a statue as well.

I look upon it now, and it is so much worse.

My head aches, and my skin is screaming. I am shaking with pain, and it was only going to get worse. I have been having nightmares, ones where I am lost within the dark, unable to find any light at all. I know I am outside, but I cannot see a thing. Because there are no stars.

Then I feel a heat.

And then there is fire.

I feel it in my bones. The raspy pain that comes from the breaks in my skin.

While at the museum I decided to look up the things we discussed about before we stopped talking. You told me about a ritual, and this was my chance to see if I could find something you missed. But I am not like you. You are the researcher. I am the student. That is our role within each others lives, and though I wish it wasn't the case, I found nothing that made it any easier. That made things clearer.

Nothing that could help stop this from happening.

It is getting to the time of year when things are supposed to be getting warmer, but things are only freezing and breaking down, crops dying, and people going missing in the night. I have seen bodies hiding in the corners of rooms, and I have seen people begging for food when it is the cold that with reach them first. I have seen the end in my dreams...

The writing between the rows. The dying of the sun.

This is a disaster of our own making, but not of all. At least not most of us.

I failed you love, even though I tried to help hold things together. Every time I would hear about how much you were in pain my heart would break and my head would scream as I tried desperately to not just get on a plane and see you...

I made that mistakes. Not you. Never you.

If I told you earlier what was happening, you would have had a fuller picture. If I had come and found you before things got like they are, maybe you wouldn't have felt the need to pull away. Maybe together we could have found a way out. I had convinced myself that the guilt had left me, but it never went away. I simply convinced myself that it wasn't hurting me anymore, that I had accepted my part in all of this and moved on.

But I haven't.

The guilt is still there. Sitting in my heart.

Writhing within my skin.

The guilt rises back when I try to get to sleep, though it will not come. I sleep for only hours, only to awake unable to see for a time, like I had stared into the sun for too long.

And have tried to find you again. I know I have. But almost finding you isn't good enough. Almost making things better isn't good enough. I needed to have reached out when you needed me, and told the truth before I was supposed to. I needed to do so so much for you and now I am sitting here, sick and alone in my room because I know that it is getting to be too late, and that all I have done by coming here is spent my final days trying to chase after someone who doesn't want to see me.

And I know that I have lost you, and that the sun is dying. Time is short. And this guilt eats at me, and sits within my skin.

Like a burning.

A heat that nothing soothes.

Because it is always there. It is always waiting for me.

Whenever it gets dark.

I love you Niomi, so so much.

I know I can't ask this of you anymore, but I hope you do it all the same.

Please wait for me.

Please.

You are the only thing that makes the burning stop.