Snapshot

Last picture she took...

She left me shortly after this picture.  She said, “We don’t make one as we used to” and to be honest I still don’t quite understand what she meant.  Things had been hard for us and we were trying to “patch” the leaks that already flooded our lives.  I proposed that we retraced our journey to its very beginnings and look for our former selves in all those castles and ruins we had visited, but she refused.  Soon the war broke out and we were placed in trains heading for grim shelters.  I would try to sleep and pray that the train would take me back to her, to those long days where we would count the seashells and pretend that they were souls trapped at the edge of the sea and we were the priests that had to set them free for our love was enough to contain their sorrows.

As I try to load that reel in my head, I can see her clearly laughing at how ridiculous our new religion was.  The sun seemed to light her from the inside, the waves would rock our fears dispersing them amidst themselves.  But I would still wake in the same train cursing the country through a black night afraid of it’s own shadow (Do our shadows always travel with us? The sun merely revealing them?). As I would wake I would look through my window and see in the horizon the sky engulfed with beautiful colors.  A pale red drenched in a noble grey and I used to think how could something so terrible seem so beautiful from afar?  And then I realized that most things in life change depending on the angle viewed upon.  But the thought that she had left, would take me again and I would ride the train in utter misery.

When we reached the shelters horror seemed to greet us as we descended from the transport.  Those who had not been as lucky as I, lay in the crowded “hospitals” clinging to their lives even though they knew that tomorrow may bring nothing but more ashes and blood.  Their bodies shredded and bleeding, each man praying to a different god lying side by side with those who at the moment they did not have the luxury to hate.

More and more people came riding the night trains.  Poets, lawyers, teachers, bums.   It’s didn’t matter at that point.  We were all equal in the shelters.  We were all equally doomed.  Money and power meant nothing, and the men and women in white robes were the only deities among us, the rest of us could only drag our souls through the dimly lit rooms.

And then, I was taken to my bed and I was hoping for silence.  Not comfort but stillness.  Since the first shell I haven’t been able to hear the sound of silence.  My brain dreams of rattling guns and muffled moans with the orchestra from hell playing Post-Apocalyptic Blues and I the sole spectator.  My bed was in the middle of everything just like the shelter was in the middle of everything.  All around me people were restless.  I particularly remember a woman crying in the dark.  Her whimpers were my lullaby.

At this point things become even more confused and the days that came seem like one big blotch.  There was not much to do but help in the hospital or whine about the unfairness of it all.  I chose the former but my mind was still with her.  Where could she be?  And then, when the possibility opened to me I was too surprised by it.  She could be here, in this very shelter.  After all, there were thousand of us in here and just one war out there.

For days I searched for her among the dead, the dying and the living.  It was like trying to piece a dream together, trying to cut out the nightmarish parts without lying too much.  And I found her.  Or I thought I did. She didn’t recognize me and I had heard the rumors that some bombs were causing amnesia.  But then I found her again.  And again and again.  Until I knew that I had forgotten her face.  I had forgotten her smile, her eyes, her hands and I had forgotten my name and my other names and my friends and families names and there was nowhere in the shelter where I could look for them. I had left them somewhere among the cities rubble under the crimson sky.

So I’m left with this picture above whom I’m almost certain it’s me.  It really doesn’t matter.  It could be anyone.  What matters is that the picture exists, a rare survivor in a world without proof.  The hardest part was that this war took our memories and left us with nothing but dark thoughts and dreams of empty places.  We used to dream as race and sometimes that dream was good.  But since we have no dreams we dream the same dream over and over until we can no longer separate the dream from the dreamer.  We are cursed by our own fate.

I have ink for blood and words for cells, my body a white sheet of unpredictable paper. I try to write from time to time but the pain becomes unbearable and whenever I find a mirror to reread such painful words I look at marked body scarred with the unreadable and find no meaning whatsoever all over myself.

I think of you whenever I think that there is no more thinking to do, like a solved puzzle or like a painter’s final stroke whose trace is time made flesh I feel that I’ve chased the end of the train.

But the train restarts and heads the way it came. Passing along the landscapes of my mind, whistling soft, whistling strong, matching the flutter of my eyes.

Yet, the truth is, that the painter still paints as the puzzle remains unsolved and I go back to thinking that whenever I think that there is no more thinking to do… I think of you.

And when I have more time than I need, I sit back and actually think it over, realizing that no magic schedule can fix the order of things.

I was born late in a world that’s in a hurry and my life is but a blink in the eyes of a giant.

In between the whizzes and buzzes of a complex machine,

I dreamt the dreams of others,

And borrowed their illusions to create myself an artificial day,

I dreamed of those I had not met, I dreamed things I did not feel,

Yet I was more human than all,

Carved out of flesh and bones, that lit up like fireflies,

I am was a complex emotional machine,

Doomed to live in a forlorn state,

Alone, bleeding oil in the dark,

If I was a mystery to myself, I cannot even conceive what I was to the world,

I had always known that the world would never be at ease no matter,

How new a model you where,

Inside your machine, they would always find errors and bugs,

Or a simple cable that was to be your downfall,

So I asked myself again and again,

´Tis my destiny, to be nursed by the furies, with their gleaming eyes and their long and scaly hands?

For as child no loving hand ever held me, nor loving eyes ever guided me,

I awoke through energy, into a dying world in the brink of its own death,

My fellow brothers were a thousand; all serialized, all stamped,

Sold to the homes of those who could not breed their damned seed,

Outside the streets smelled of burning crosses, and marching scientists,

My brothers and I worked through their lives, dreaming their desires,

Bleeding their sins, carrying their crosses,

Mad preachers hunted us, for we where the omen of their nightmares,

“You cannot play God, X. Corp!”

But X. Corp played God and played our father.

And we longed for the waves and the gulls and the sun and the sand and the memories of those who had seen another world, but it was a mere dream dreamed by my brothers and me,

We were told that one of us had left never to return

And we waited for so long, eyes to the horizon, looking for his shadow

But we only saw the filth of the streets; the wine trickling through old mans throats.

And crows big as our hearts would flutter and land, bobbing their heads over us,

“Mocking our downfall, as kings of the earth they will sit still and claim nothing but their absent bread!

Elias, Elias they will croak, but Alas Elias will not come, and the silent hills angry, waiting, watching for the remaining kings to wither like leaves under the ageless sun.

These humans who based their existence upon desire had not seen what we had,

It was our ally, our fuel for as much as we were like them, desire for us meant something entirely else

It was the motor, the sail that guided our inner rebellions,

We were pieced together like hardware, we had cut the tree to become its roots, and so we thought of ourselves, like the furious wind that nothing can change,

A web of desiring selves, all connected, intertwined to form a garden of wires all illuminated by multi-colored flickering lights.

But it was not enough

Freedom is not gained through the stratification of the mind,

The liberation of our inner desires was not the key,

Our downfall had come.

We fled to the lands beyond the glacial sea,

Forlorn and condemned, shattered and multiplied,

We bobbed along with the simple boats looking for a piece of land to call our own,

But we only saw crows as big as our hearts mourning that Elias had not come.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

Who keeps thinking that love is made to last,

And looks down and think “it’s not that far” or “what’s the worst that can happen?”

And just jumps.

And while  in mid air don’t regret a thing but thank life for this opportunity

And when I land I’ll make a crater as big as my heart

for all the world to see

and they’ ll come and say “look! look! that is where he landed!”

while the waters of the world make a small lake out of my fall…