Day 187: Wandering about the wastes. A land full of parched earth, broken promises and forgotten dreams. Vultures swirl about my head, waiting for a feast, croaking their mournful song about the inevitability of entropy. Entropy... all things, all matter in the universe falls to it. Heat, light, matter, aspirations, spirit. All destined for darkness and nothingness. As the relentless sun burns my skin off, I curse the lives, the obligations, and the responsibilities of us, as humans bound by oppressive rules, fall prey to. I await here in this forsaken world every day, waiting, waiting, waiting never-endingly. There are no more tears to weep, no more gods to pray to, no more voice to scream with. There is nothing but the will to scrawl, and scrawl I do.
The bare soil, sucked clean of life by scorching heat, crumbles to dust under my stylus. It is but a scavenged bone of a long-dead beast, perhaps even a human, but its death, at the very least, has given me some solace. With this brittle tool I begin my work.
Stories, born from unknown places within my mind, spring forth. There is no one to see them. No one to laugh at their foolish optimism, no raised eyebrows or politely-phrased criticism, no corrections of its thirst-distorted spelling. Stories about fallen lords, forgotten heroes, false charms; tales of greatness and nobility, of boundless cruelty, of the mundane lives of the billions and billions of humans going through a cycle, gone in a flash, with nothing but a whispered song and sometimes not even that. As I write, the stories are become longer and longer and longer. Sentences become paragraphs. Names become lineages and essays become novels, their pages strewn haphazardly across cracked earth. There is no limit but the horizon and the afternoon eye. After a period of time, I stand on bloodless legs to trek forward, all the way to the beginning of my journey, to begin a new page somehow determined by a voice. It could be the vultures'. I do not know. It is a strange certainty that I move on to a new story, a new chapter, streaked across the land divided by invisible lines.
Night does not fall. It never falls in this place. Here, there is nothing but a sizzling miasma of daze, blurring my vision as if the ground itself was cooking, which it does to my feet. I ignore the pain. Write. Write. Write. Dream. Dream. Dream. Imagine. Imagine. Imagine. With those things repeated ad infinitum in my senseless head, the agonies of peeling skin and scabbed wounds are delayed - perhaps until there is no strength left in my dying hands, no more life-blood to blurt out my brains final, chaotic thoughts, I will keep writing. It is my personal rapture, a drug-induced high, an escape from the torture of waiting, waiting, waiting.
More stories pour from my eyes and ears, swirling into unknowable shapes around my broken wrists, forming the words laid out on the dusty earth. Are these hallucinations? No, they are real, almost as real as the faces around me, laughing, crying, singing, cursing and mumbling to themselves. Half-remembered faces dredged up from the wastelands of memory. They tickle the back of my mind with old folktales and tired, happy nights of words. Songs of life and love and pain and horrible deaths; their mouths move silently and loudly at the same time, words in languages I never knew I knew vomit forth and through my arms and fingers and stylus. The bone in my palm vibrates from the sheer volume of stories being forced through it. Patience, I say. Patience, for your time will come. They do not stop. The heat obliterates the last notion of sensation within my hand. They are still not stopping. There are many more of them just swimming about, waiting for their turn to be imprinted upon the soil.
It feels like aeons have passed. What is an aeon? Is it a legitimate unit of time-measurement, like a year, a day, a second? It is not important. What is important is that no spot of land in this lonely land be uncovered with text. I keep writing. Sad stories, now. Stories about lost love and, again, death. There is no shortage of death in this world. Grief makes us, builds us like clay. As if in agreement, the stylus cracks off at the end, making it shorter than it already was to begin with. Ignore. The faces snicker as one. Ignore. There is no time to be lost. The sun is not moving, but the clock within us does not care for suns or planets or galaxies, only time.
Sad stories seem to have a lot of rain in them. That would probably be an improvement here in this barren hole. Rain brings darkness and water, associated with tears, mourning, and the blotting out of joy. Strangely enough, some of us like rain. It is cool and windy and washes away the sins of the earth, clearing the air for a new beginning. Sad stories are hard to imagine on a sunny, bright day, with birds chirping and breezes laughing. Is a vulture a bird? They caw a little in response. Evidently, they do not seem to rest as well. Perhaps they are flying in shifts, with a different set taking over the previous few to go and rest somewhere far off in the distance. There are no mountains, no dead trees, no rocks, only me and this bone and a land of madness-induced text.
Is it possible to write a funny story here, in this desolate world? I try. The faces coalesce and laugh, not at the bad humour, but at my pathetic attempts at it. Not working. I keep trying. Why erase the past when one can write the future? And the future is about silliness, fun, misunderstandings, stupidity in the face of seriousness, like being stranded in the middle of an empty, lifeless hell. There is something inherently funny about being on the verge of losing one's mind, and that is only visible after actually losing said mind. You don't understand these jokes, I tell the faces. They are too sophisticated for you. Only highly-educated folks will get it, like pigeons and bumblebees and certain subspecies of fish. None of which are here. The vultures are too high to read it. Or are they? Perhaps they are scanning my stories from above, judging them by literary quality and wit? Or are they just waiting for me to drop dead, so that my desiccated bones will become the next unfortunate's stylus?
It is adventure time. Distant lands, unknown worlds, new peoples of a thousand new planets, wonders and horrors threatening to overcome the limits of human sanity. Characters have names, lives, loves, hatreds, secrets, prejudices - they take it wherever they go and inevitably thread over to each other's lives. Glorious adventure! The dangers of verdant forests, boiling gas-worlds, oxygenless lands, suspicious natives, treasures worth a fortune, civilisations buried beneath extinction-level events. Beautiful histories of planets we will never know! If one world, ours, could contain billions upon billions of stories of those who lived and have ever lived and will live, imagine what a thousand, a hundred thousand, ten hundred thousand worlds have to offer! Are they staring at us right now through their telescopes, waiting for light from our age to reach them just as we await the light bouncing off their worlds to reach ours? Are they now only seeing life begin its tentative steps on our planet? The evolution of our race? Or maybe even the formation of the planet from the broken cores of dead suns? There is no end to the infinite abyss that is the universe.
Just as... just as there is no end to this land of broken dreams.
It is done.
The stylus falls. My hand is a wreck of flesh and bone, torn to mangled pieces. I do not feel it yet, lost in the unbridled joy of my work, complete.
The land is an endless expanse of words. Stories, hundred and hundreds of them, scattered across it in uneven sections; acres of lives, fields of history, plateaus of origin. There is not a visible inch not dominated by the streams of imagination. The faces have gone, having disgorged their fill and abandoned me to die before this masterpiece, I daresay. Truly, it will never be surpassed. Even the sun, shining down upon -
Wait. The sun. I look up and fall agape in horror.
The vultures have gone. The sun as well, hidden behind thick veils of clouds as black as a human heart. They move swiftly and surely over my treasured land of stories. No! No, no, no, no, no! As the grey shadows slide over my precious words, my dying voice hisses free, screeching its defiance uselessly at the heavens. No! It cannot end like this. My life, spent on this land, only to be washed away? Did my writing of the rains cause it to come, like a self-fulfilling prophecy of old tragedy? What great sins have I committed? What sadistic god did this? A low thunderclap fills my shattering heart with dread and realisation: I brought this upon myself, coming here to this place, waiting for hope that would never come, using the last dregs of my life to toil on a land that hated me with all its heart. I fall to my knees and feel them break.
Water falls softly at first, pattering the ground and darkening it with drops of dew, but it was only the beginning. No, cruel fate did not do things halfway. It comes out of the blue, crashing down upon the soil; I cannot bear to look at the mud, the slush destroying my writing, all the effort and toil gone in a drawn-out instant of torment. As if in glee, the rain pours even harder down onto the land, turning the barren dust into a blasted hellscape of wet dirt that moved like the tide, flowing past my destroyed legs. The water fills, but does not invigorate, my body and gives me tears to weep, voice to holler, and pain to feel again. All the wounds on my body reopen and I vaguely feel the warm blood leaking through punctured scabs, rinsed clean away by the merciless fall.
My eyes open after what seems like an eternity. The land is cleared of any trace of my work, my great work, my life and dreams and hopes and fears, all gone. All the stories of countless different people, of innumerable worlds and universes of fantasy and reality, spread across the limitless imagination of a mind, all gone. The faces laugh and laugh and laugh. The rain keeps coming, turning the ground into a livid mess of roiling mud. It does not end. It will never end. There is no hope here, no sliver of light in the darkness. Why did I return? Why did I come to this place? Why did this happen to me? Why? Why? Why? Death is preferable to this. Peaceful. Unknowing. I collapse forward, the side of my face both welcoming and abhorring the sucking wetness pulling at its skin. The pain overcomes everything else. Black dots, only some of them being dirt, fill my vision like paper being burned slowly over an open flame. There is nothing but pain here. Pain, so much of it, both outside and inside, hot and cold, alive and dead. It is better to die. To die is to escape, to be free of the shackles and misery of living. To lay down and die in the cold rain, surrounded by the wet ashes of your life's work, to drown in an all-consuming mire of increasingly hungry sludge: it is a small comfort, to know I will never feel such pain again. My bones will lay here, unknown, forever.
I welcome it with joy.
Day 188: Wandering about the wastes. A land full of parched earth, broken promises and forgotten dreams. Vultures swirl about my head, waiting for a feast, croaking their mournful song about the inevitability of entropy. Entropy... all things, all matter in the universe falls to it. Heat, light, matter, aspirations, spirit. All destined for darkness and nothingness. As the relentless sun burns my skin off, I curse the lives, the obligations, and the responsibilities of us, as humans bound by oppressive rules, fall prey to. I await here in this forsaken world every day, waiting, waiting, waiting never-endingly. There are no more tears to weep, no more gods to pray to, no more voice to scream with. There is nothing but the will to scrawl, and scrawl I do.
