| abstract
| - It came from the stars. It came on May 15th, 2014 and fell down from the sky as the only bright thing on a rainy night. It landed two miles from my house, and landed just close enough that I didn’t turn back enough and think it was no use, and just far enough that nobody would come all the way with me so I could prove it to them. It ripped a hole in the clouds and tore apart the atmosphere and rewrote the rules of the game we call life in its own sick twisted handwriting. It told us it could be trusted and only revealed its true self to the ones of us who nobody believes, who never cried wolf but were just not good enough. It ripped a gaping gash in the minds of each and every one of us, until it could recreate that tear in our physical selves and wipe every thinking thing off of the face of the world. Everything but me. And now I live in fear, hiding every time I hear the roar of a plane or the engine of a car, because I can’t trust the signs that used to designate humanity, and animals, and warmth, and trust, and welcome, and safety. Because none of those exist anymore because all there is is me, and this shell of a world I live in, and it. And it wiped everything so cleanly that sometimes I forget, sometimes I think it’s just another uneventful day in an uneventful town but that never lasts because you can’t forget coming home and thinking you’re going to see your parents and do your homework and seeing that nobody’s home, nobody’s home anywhere because they’re all gone and now you’re alone, and all there is in life is dying and not wanting to die, until you finally do want to die. I see these streets and I hear voices, not the voice that’s always in my head saying don’t mess up, don’t mess up, your life’s on the line worthless and inevitably ending as it is, or the other voice, the one that came on the night it came from the stars, the voice that came on May 15th, 2014, the voice that I think is it but I don’t know because it feels like it’s me, but the voice of a world. The voice of a people. A voice that starts as a laugh mixed with a lull mixed with a sob and then turns to a rumble and then to a roar and crescendos until it’s a scream of joy and courage and new life when it becomes a new scream, a different kind of scream. The scream you hear in the dead of night and makes you wake up and grab your gun, the scream that is the last thing a dying soldier hears and doesn’t know is coming out of his mouth, the scream of the wrongly prosecuted witches and rightly prosecuted prisoners and war heroes and horror movie haters and boys who cried wolf like me. And it makes me want to cry but I don’t because crying is just a signal, it doesn’t change anything, it just tells anyone else that I need comfort but now that there’s not anyone else there’s no need to cry, no need for even emotions. And I know what I need, I know the only way I’m going to survive is if I jettison my emotions but I don’t want to do that, because I don’t want to become a marching soldier, an assembly line robot, who only does what it needs to survive, who doesn’t feel, doesn’t think just marches on making the cars and fighting the wars for the game maker it doesn’t even know. I don’t want to do that because I don’t want to be an it, because I know I’m not an it. I am the boy who cried wolf, I am the harbinger of the end of the world, I am the man who used to be just a kid before a thing crash landed two miles from his house, I am the man that ran two miles and didn’t turn back, I am the man who though that doomed everyone he’d ever known and countless more to a fate he can only imagine, I am the last living thing on the face of the Earth. So I’m writing this, hoping it’s not true, hoping I’m some nut in the hospital frothing at the mouth babbling about the apocalypse, hoping that someone, anyone is alive to read this and knows what it’s like to be in a world devoid. Because I can’t do this alone. So entertain my dream, my hopeless fantasy that there’s something else out there that breathes, someone that still knows what it’s like to smile and taste and scream and make small talk and love someone else and hate someone else and yell and cry and feel, just feel, just knowing someone, something is out there that can feel is enough for me, please. You’re all I have.
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