pantry, but there is nothing. But I'm now afraid to even try to open my mouth because my jaw may have locked from being closed so long. I had to grab my left arm with my right one yesterday and exercise it just to regain the ability to move it. It felt how I remember falling asleep laying on my arm did. Waking up and not realizing it was completely asleep and reaching for something but if offering no movement. The rubbery feeling of it grasped in your opposite hand as you shake it to try and bring back any kind of feeling, let alone usage of it. Life has become a nightmare, a sequence of tests of fear, like some sick joke is being played on us all to see how much we can take before ending our own lives, but the very will to do so does not exist any longer. Why has God forsaken us? Why do we press on? Why do we continue to allow ourselves to dream this nightmare up when it could all be ended so easily?
Occasionally a helicopter will fly over, hover for about an hour and then leave. I presume they're checking to see if we've died out just yet; like a vulture circling, waiting to claim its ill-gotten prize. What will they do once we're gone? Rebuild this city? Leave it abandoned? Burn it? Preserve it? We have run out of food and the iron supply is ever decreasing. We might survive to ten months. Ten months, after having spent over three-hundred and sixty here, to nothing, amounting to pile of rubble and ash and scattered corpses with not a requiem for their passing but rather a celebration no doubt. It would be a victory to them. For that, they deserve to burn . . . And they will. Perhaps not in this life, but they will burn. They shall know the pain they've caused us by abandoning us, one way or another. Their conscience shall be rendered as one to the flames and they will know the deviation from life we've been sentenced to. They shall find a feast only in our bones and their jaws may go slack, growing tired from breaking their teeth on our remains and crying out in pain—no, in shame, in the same self-loathing as we have cried out! They will be cast out from themselves and they will despair at their own existence, yet they will not find it within themselves to end their misery. They will long for something they cannot keep . . . One day.
If you are uninfected and reading this, are you not one of those who simply waited until we died out, until the virus had run its course and we had slowly rotted away into nothingness? Perhaps you will be from another generation altogether, a generation that feels compassion and tries to help those in need. In all man's history there has not been such a generation, and there never will be so long as we—they—you see yourselves as different from one another. You're all the same. Different trials, different faces, different lives, but you're all the same. Is the blood in your veins not red instead of the black that is within ours? Maybe when you realize that, then you will see that it's not the color of blood at all that makes you the same, but the thirst within you? What makes you different is not nearly as important as what makes you the same. The vermilion-flamed sky at sunset, is it not the same as the cerulean sky of mid-day? Is it still not the same sky that is the color of pitch in the dark of twilight, or a bright saffron at the dawn? Though the colors change, the air and weather and every quality about it may change, it is still the same sky, just as every human being one with each other, their brethren. The black within our veins, does it really make us that different from the red within yours? Or are we still one with each other through our common spirit?
No human will read this until long after I, and all the others like me, have passed. The city will likely be 'sanitized', or even 'purged' before humans are allowed back in. In such a scenario, this journal will be reduced to ash along with what remains of my skeleton, and none will ever read this at all, so why do even I bother? Because I have no desire not to bother. I am learning to turn my apathy in on itself—if I have no desire to do anything, alas, I also have no desire to do nothing. With such an absence of will . . . Does anything matter anymore? Is this all there is left: just ink and lead on a piece of paper that no one will ever see? Is that all that my life and the half-million other dead lives that blight this city amount to? There must be something else. If I die now or next week or next month or next year . . . What's the difference? Nobody would even know. Sometimes panic stirs up inside me thinking about that, but it quickly dissipates and the hunger returns in its place.
Sometimes the thought of that crimson fluid that flows in your veins causes me to salivate. The memory of being punched in the jaw is almost overwhelming. The metallic taste of my own life force swirling, mixing with my saliva into a slimy, red and clear elixir; to bottle it up and drink it like brandy would surpass any aged wine that the world has ever known.
Truly, we are becoming desperate for something. For release. For death.
I do hope we die painlessly and quickly. None but very few of us wish for a cure, for the present extent of decay is far beyond the body's ability to repair and we would never be quite human again. Another reason is that we've become something more here, alone, without humanity's hand at our throats. We are free people now, despite being locked within this city and having such an unyielding craving for iron. Our minds do not focus now on our differences but our similarities. We have transcended humanity and become the living dead. Is this not a more liberated existence? Surely, a short span of life in such a free state of being would be greater than decades in their world.
Perhaps this is the reason we've been cursed in such a way; to be blessed in another?
July, perhaps August by now, 2014
My jaw had locked last week when I made my last journal entry. I have not eaten since then, though it feels as though my stomach has taken to feasting on itself. Unendurable cramps blister me from the inside. It wouldn't matter if my jaw did work, for there is no longer any food to find, and my legs also are beginning to lock and are almost completely immobile now. I am confined to this bed like a paralytic having use of only my arms. Many of us have starved to death already, and I simply await my turn. No point in getting worked up over something I can't change; the inevitable is the comfortable, regardless of what ends it may bring with it.
It seems such a pointless endeavor to continue this log when I feel tomorrow or the next day shall be my last. What a legacy to leave behind; a bedridden corpse clinging to a journal like a dog to a bone. It is not because it enjoys chewing on the bone that it keeps it, but because it's simply something to do.
This journal, even if it is swept away in a blaze of fire, having been read by none, actually is quite a legacy; a documentation of the healthy becoming the sick while the sick become the healthy. The chronicling of this altered state and reversal of roles, this ascension from what we were into what we are, may prove the most noble ideological decision of my life—and ever-present death. To give humanity a glimpse into our world, to see themselves as someone looking in a mirror; I tried to give them a wake-up call. Whether or not they heed it, or even find it at all, is no longer in my hands.
Once more I may write to you, keeper(s) of tomorrow's world, and I pray you cherish the life you have been given.
My time has come. It is all the strength left in me to put these words down as I lie here, unable to stand or even sit up. I have learned that dying to this world was the greatest thing that happened to any of us. I would have preferred if Nadia had not passed so early, for she would have greatly enjoyed the transition of mind. Once we shared the same song: a duet. The two parts existed apart from one another, but when performed together they became a masterpiece. We had sang that song until the day her voice gave in to the chorus of the world. Once of hope and life, her part became one of absence and delusion; her part echoed the choir of mankind's hopelessness, desolation, greed and hatred.
And then it was gone. But soon we shall sing the same perfect harmony once more.
However, the world is bright again, though still cloud-covered and dark. The colors may be dull, and the light dim, but everything seems to radiate a light from within itself now. Joy and sorrow have become one and the same, just as hope and fear, beginning and end, pain and comfort; these things were not ever so distant, but our percep
tions of them had made them so. In sorrow, we know joy will come, and they have merged. In fear, we have hope for relief, and they have merged. In the end, we find a beginning, and they have merged. We grow accustomed to the pain and it becomes a comfort, and they have merged. The pain is here, and I am afraid, for in sorrow do I await my end. Likewise, the comfort consumes, and I have hope for joy in a new beginning.
The end is coming sooner than I thought--
To the future generations, all I can say is . . . “It's okay.”
About the author:
Josh Isaacs is a person of few spoken words, and instead chooses to fall into the written word to convey his thoughts.
His days are spent watching canceled sci-fi shows, listening to music, reading sci-fi books and articles about technology, and hoarding various trinkets/memorabilia related to Star Trek and various super heroes. His dream is to become a professional author, but will settle for anything that pays.
Other titles by Josh Isaacs:
Perceptions
Heart Of A Soldier
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jos.h2o
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