A Letter From Before
No one really knows how it all ended, no one that's still around anyway. If it was a series of small pressures that built and built eventually overwhelming the system or if it was over in one dramatic instant. What matters is that, like everything that came before and everything that will come after, it ended. Some of us, a dwindling few, even remember what it was like before everything went to shit. We carry the corpse of that other world on our shoulders and in our hearts, weighed down by the chains of another time, another state of being.
What no one was prepared for was the absolute silence that fell over the world after the initial riots and panic. It was, and still is, like a blanket smothering us all. Any infrastructure for communication fell on the first day or as close that it makes no real difference. We lost the world and our sense of community shrank. The villages you can still stumble on from time to time are thriving, not because of a global sense of "us" and togetherness but because the young there, the true denizens of what the world became, fill their days honing skills to survive, not longing for lands beyond their hunting grounds. The rest of us, the great yet forgotten Before, we are ill-equipped tourists.
The room I'm in was mine in childhood. The house itself less ruined than the surrounding buildings, I couldn't say how but I'm grateful that it's mostly how I remember it. The kitchen where I fell and almost broke my leg when I was 12. I spent the entire summer on crutches and having all my food brought to me in bed, I felt like a king. The backyard where I got into my first fight because some kid knocked my sister down. I was terrified of my father's wrath when he got home, but he took me to buy a video game because he was proud I fought for the right reason. Even with the roof partially collapsed and the wallpaper long since peeled I know this place like I know myself. Every inch of this place is me and I am it.
The view from my window reminds me that the gap between that world and this one continues to grow and may go on forever. The green taking hold of the buildings and bursting through asphalt like miniature rockets exiting the atmosphere. The wildlife grazing on those verdant shuttles with no fear of the cars long since gone to rust. I don't think I was meant to see such beauty and it is beautiful. That's something else we weren't prepared for, no one knew how breathtaking the end of the world would end up being. Nature recovering from the wound that was mankind. Consuming our great structures, our hubris, like a kid in a candy shop.
The weight of it all has gotten too much for these old bones. Like everything else I'm not what I used to be. The deep brown on my head turned grey and then settled on white. The blue in my eyes become a little more dull with each passing year and my hearing is all but gone, not that there's much to hear these days. A weariness has taken hold of me and it goes past being bone deep. It's a weariness of soul. This isn't my world anymore and I went as far as my feet would take me. I think it's time I rest awhile in this old room and take the chains off.
If you happen to find this I stashed some supplies under the sink, I hope they help keep you going. Please don't move my body, I'm right where I need to be. I'm home. It doesn't matter how I died, what matters is that, like everything that came before and everything that will come after, it was time for an end.