Their stories mostly belonged to other people, but were relayed in a tone and with an enthusiasm which signified that they had expropriated those stories and now claimed them as their own. Their lives were only as interesting as the stories they were able to tell, or the anecdotes freely available to the embellished narratives they recounted. What was shared between them was not any sort of ethical code, moral solidarity, or even mutual affection, but rather a mimicry of these. They said all the right things, toed the correct lines, sanctimoniously grumbled over the approved injustices to complain about.
She, on the other hand, never said the right thing. Emma toyed too freely with ideas outside of the prescribed realm of possibilities, pushed the carefully constructed boundaries to the brink with thoughts that found their way through the cracks of the drop-down menu. These people were a mystery to her, an almost unreality taking the form of human beings. When she looked at them, listened to them speak, she saw and heard algorithms, sequences, programs: calculated, refined perfection.
While around them she was confused about what constituted a life. Is this a life?
They didn't seem to share her reality with her, one full of grey areas and complexity and volition. In her reality, the one she believed to be true, the question of "or" didn't exist. There was no such thing as endings, or beginnings, or of a case being closed. Humility, compassion, courage: these were virtues in her reality, not pathologies. They didn't seem to share this reality with her, so she turned to the stars, books, anything that would make her feel alive and less like a machine.
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
Her childhood home, where she now lived alone, was situated along the river, surrounded by trees and long, meandering footpaths carved out by her father. Across the way was Apex One, the nuclear power plant, with its bulging towers puffing thick, white smoke into the air at a constant, creeping pace. You could see the plumes from wherever you were in town, from the lowest point in the valley to the peak of the nearest mountain.
She remembered sitting on the bank of the river watching the swells come out of the towers, trying to decipher the forms and hidden figures as she would with the clouds in the sky. She remembered never finding anything that resembled life at all. She remembered thinking that God hadn't touched those clouds, but was certain that He shaped the ones of the heavens. The smoke coming from the towers never evaporated or naturally phased out as it rose: it just seemed to hit a point in the sky and stop.
Soon after her father's passing, Emma planted flowers along the riverfront, and overtime her small patch grew into a thriving garden. The new insects that arrived with the flora brought about new creatures, who deposited their own seeds into the ground, and the garden evolved beyond a signification of her own personal contrivance: it was taken back by the Earth, and she let it be so. She, too, was taken back by the Earth, finding companionship amongst the beings that could withstand seasons and understood responsibility, and beauty.
Resentment grew in her, too, of the void of her childhood, the vacuousness of the world she was brought into. She was grateful that nature had reclaimed the garden for itself, because her motivation to maintain it, her desire to create, to build anything for the future, waxed and waned with unpredictable rigor. The disorientation of what was considered to be twenty-first century life stifled her will, and the thought of her own uselessness replayed in her mind all the time. She learned what it meant to have to fight: to fight for that which she knew was hers in the first place.
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
One day the garden began to wither. This happened slowly: leaves began to shrivel up and turn yellow, falling to the ground unceremoniously. Trees wilted from their upright positions and took the form of something that looked completely tattered, haunted. The grass that lined the paths looked scorched, and made a gritting, grating sound when walked on. The typically steady streams of smoke from Apex One had become more erratic, sputtering out of the towers, and took on a hue that darkened with each day.
Emma began to wither, too: the circles under her eyes became darker, the fat on her limbs dissipated, her hair thinned. The daily motions of her life became comically monotonous, requiring little thought, just the movement of her weakening body. She felt like she was dead, or at the very least completely flayed. It was a deliberate choice she made, every second of every day, to believe and re-believe in the idea that there was something salvageable here, something to struggle for.
Her friends made jokes: don’t we all feel like we’re dying nowadays? Is anyone really happy? We all hate our lives, our jobs, our bodies, the country is burning down… join the fucking club. They never noticed the power plant, or never cared to pay attention to it. They didn’t have to: they were so busy with their agreeing and their nonchalance and their therapy to try to sort out the “issues” that their psychologists told them were from their parents. Amidst this raucous laughter and apparent relatability, Emma felt the need to lay her head down and sleep for a very long time.
No comments:
Post a Comment