If anyone asked me for a specific time and date as if to document when all this exactly started, I’d be stunned and unresponsive for a while, thinking; that is hypothetically, if this scenario happened while I was alive. I do not think that anyone was interested in the facts about the situation, or anything that really mattered in that context; I am convinced that something would have changed by now if that was the case. But I wouldn’t ever know that for sure; I might also be completely misjudging it.
I haven’t been lucky enough to know the purpose of my barely identifiable existence that allows me to only think. It isn’t life, so is this death? Or is it something in between, or something entirely different?
I have no idea. But I am more of a consciousness than ever, thus there is a reason for me to be still able to arrange my thoughts in strings, to become pieces of fabric that I can sew together; so that it becomes a story you can feel, so you can twist its hem like a cloth and know that you’re holding a work showing the earth in a moment that could be viewed as irrelevant or as something of great importance; it all is just a matter of how you look at it.
In all that time I have been searching an answer before dying, I wasn’t able to find out just why it was exactly me that lived the longest, and whether it was a punishment or a blessing to have lived. It used to bother me greatly, but now it is just something I like to think of occasionally. Though I still wonder if it may have been my fault; and if that turned out to be true, wouldn’t that mean I am a traitor, that I betrayed my pod with whom I have been with for my whole life? It is as if I willingly chose to survive, at the cost of my companions, who then had no choice but to die. And then, I think that this whole thought process is just trying to find a culprit for an unfortunate situation, and that I try to avoid thinking about the possibility that there mightn’t be one, that this happened because it had to happen. That there simply just wasn’t a way to survive. That thought feels alien to me; all I’ve known was that at given opportunities, you must fight for survival. It’s a game with a loser and a winner, where the loser dies and the winner survives. The reason why this situation is so peculiar is that there doesn’t appear to be a winner. There doesn’t even seem to exist a party of two. It’s only the world against something that can’t be identified, much less fought with or destroyed.
I started the journey that I’ll be talking about because of this exact reason; to find out what it was that effectively killed an almost entire species off. I wasn’t interested in fighting it, for I knew I would surely lose. But I was curious, I wanted to find out what happened. I didn’t know how I would approach this matter, but I had a goal, and I had determination. As long as I knew where I was going, I was convinced I’d be okay.
© can_of_rotten_beans 2023-09-20