Don't Look Back - Date Unknown

I've never been very good at letting go, but then again that’s why I’m so good at keeping things together. 

I suppose I’ve lost sight of that for some time now, and the longer I’m caught in this grasp, the more I start to wonder if it’s finally time to loosen my grip, to give up, to finally break a promise I never thought I would break.  I've become like those foolish old men I used to admonish for their stubborn ways, lost, chasing a world dead and gone long before they are.  Some are lucky and they find their time in the world, their place in the mix of it all, but so many more are standing on the shores of time waiting for the impossible to return.  Like good patron saints their dedication is unquestionable as they stare into the void of what used to be and wait for death to take them away from this world they can’t cope with.  Unlike them it’s not too late for me to find a new way, to cut these losses and move on without the burden of what will never be.  But the only way is forward, and maybe the only hope, is to let go and never look back.

Thunder - Date Unknown

The storm always brings a lot with it.

More often than not, it brings along thoughts of you, thoughts of how we used to dance around in this rain for hours without little care for much else.  Now I'm standing out here alone in this darkness waiting for the thunder to come, so when it finally fills the air and shakes me to my heart, I can call out your name and hope it will be carried across the sky to somewhere you might hear it.  Part of me knows you’re out there listening to the sounds of the rain, listening for that faint whisper of your name…. 

The other part of me though, thinks I’m a fool to bother, that even if this whisper could reach her, you wouldn't be listening anyways.  Still, like the young boy I once was I try to carry the best of my hopes out from my dreams and into the real world.  I try, despite how much better I know, to hope that someday you might be brought back to me.  That perhaps like the shamans of the old I can summon you back from the dark, back to where I need her most. Have I just become a victim to the delusions of this dark magic?  The false sense of power it brings to us in our times of need?  Or do I keep coming back out here because I can’t stop thinking about you, and that part of me knows, more than anything, that you're out just waiting to hear your name.

Virtue - Date Unknown

There’s a simple reason why men like us carry these burdens on our shoulders. 

We simply can't bear the sight of virtue lying in the mud when there’s no one else left to carry them anymore.  It’s sad, but the truth usually is.  What happens when even the most dedicated of saints can’t keep up the fight anymore?  When the pointlessness sets in and leaves our foundations in ruin?  When not all the good will left in the world is enough to lift us up and carry our way of life any further?  I suppose it then becomes a question of dying by virtues side, or going on in a world without it.  Some things we’re willing and able to do without, now I am left asking myself if this is really one of them or is the road ahead one I’m just not willing to go down?  How long have I been here asking myself this?  I guess all that really matters is the journey towards the answers, trying to figure out the awful mess so that maybe still, even after all this, something good can still be found.

Restlessness - No Date

Restlessness… 

That’s the only word I have for it. 

The night has left me sleepless, alone, and that sweet soft drawl that always makes my eyelids heavy, is nowhere to be found. Instead all I’m left with is emptying thoughts rattling around my head like thunder in the night. Questions that scream so loud I can’t even sit quietly in the dark and try to find my way to some rest. 

This thirst has me tossing, turning, pacing through these halls until I can’t take it anymore. It truly is a maddening feeling to be a prisoner to your own head like this, to know that I have little choice but to face the fact that this thing won’t put up with the games I've been playing anymore. 

Cigarettes don’t really help, but they give me something to lie to myself about. After a while I’m out on the streets watching the city while it sleeps. I can’t help but be overcome with a sense of jealousy in the stillness of it, how even the most awful of beasts can find peace… What does that make me? Something worse? Does it even matter?  At the end of the line I am still just a lost boy out in the night trying to find his way to a home that isn't there anymore, wandering with pockets full of false purpose. 

Despite this, the twilight always takes me in with open arms. Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to her like this. She never cares why I’m here, or judges me for the sins that keep me in her lonely embrace, she’s just content another one of her children has found his way back to her. Like any comfort though, the night comes and goes. She can’t be here for me when the sun sends her hiding for cover, then I am just left to another day, exhausted and no closer to finding any answers to keep the nights like these at bay.

The Wings of Hubris

Sometime I wonder how we ever got such stupid ideas in our heads.  

How we ever thought that anything could ever stay the same, or why we even want it to for that matter.  Life is flux, and it’s meaning lies in taking your new house of cards that you’ve spent all this time building and sending them crashing to the ground.  The same destruction breeds opportunity, it is only out of our ashes where we can rise up and find the heights that we crave.  For so long we’ve built pedestals and platforms to pull ourselves up so we could climb higher and higher without having to fall.  But nobody beats the crash, eventually it comes calling to bring all of it back down to the ground.  Except this time we’ve build the whole world up here in the clouds, generations of us, some who’ve never even seen how deep it goes down.  You can kid yourself for as long as you want, eventually the truth comes calling for us all.  Only this time it didn’t want just us, it wanted to take away everything and anything we have built for ourselves.  Our penance for trying to live in ignorance of our own nature.  Some lessons are harder to learn that others and some bear greater weight if you do not learn from them.  This was our undoing, our great hubris, and like the sun, when it comes, none of us will find the shade.

A Promise Is A Promise

It’s harder out here than I’d like to admit, especially without you here to give me all the reasons I need to keep going.  There is an awful horror in how little I have to say, and yet there’s a head swelling with questions and ideas that I can’t get out of me.  I used to be able to just sit, clear my mind, and let you slowly take it all apart, take it all away.  Now I’m left with nothing but a bucket of sorrow that keeps getting heavier and heavier to carry with each day that goes on. Yet I cannot let go, I carry on, and I swallow whatever lumps I must to get me through the day.  When staying alive is all you have and it takes everything you’ve got, there isn’t time to “deal”.  You push, you break, you bandage, and you keep going.  After all, there really isn’t anything else that matters.  I haven’t seen another living person for over 6 months now, and as far as I know, I might be the last one who carries anything left of the old world.  But it’s a vein sentiment, it’s nothing but a side effect of trying to keep something so much more important alive.  What I still have left of you, and the promise I made to fight until the end.

Parks, And What They Meant To Me

There’s a lost reason behind what brings us back to these old places.  A thirst that’s out of reach, lost in time with nothing left behind but the aftertaste of regrets that came with it.  I suppose we drag ourselves back here in a futile attempt for relief from their wake, anything to try and scratch the itch it leaves behind.  I don’t consider myself much different, other than the fact that I should know better, but even that doesn’t free me from the same old compulsion we suffer from.  We all have our reasons, our hopes for what might still be left behind to help bring you back to that time you are trying to find.  More over bearing than the scraps left behind is the decay of what used to be beautiful.  The unmistakable sense of loss that cannot be swallowed, not in the face of such a terrible change.  No matter how it makes you feel, the truth is the world doesn’t care, it goes on with our without your consent.  Our biggest disillusion was thinking we could ever stop the change, that we could keep things the way they are “just because it feels right”.  Eventually the excuses tire, and when it comes time to choose the next path, you’d better be ready to move, or to be left behind to join the ghosts that couldn’t take it either.  It has always come down to choice.  Sometimes there are many, sometimes there aren’t any.  But they are ours to make, and they are ours to pay for.

Questions and Answers

The winter always brings stillness with it. 

The world frozen and sleeping, even the most awful of things have to seek shelter from its clutch.  Out here in the drifts time slows down, and this rush becomes a drug that only comes around once a year.  You’d have to be insane to go out in storms like these, and since insanity makes such good shelter, I hurry through the worst of it while it still gives cover.  The mistake most men make is not to see the most obvious of things, countless times audacity has crept up behind the worst of villains, they were just too caught up in the shimmer of impossible things to notice before it was too late.

I suppose this is what separates us, though we could argue on and on about who’s right and who’s wrong, at the end of the day I’m still standing.  They’re dead, gone, and clutching the worthless virtues they died for.  Being alive is being right.  It’s as simple as that.  “The Meaning of life” is a deceptive phrase, life isn't here to lecture us about meaning, life is asking you a question and the answers are simple.  You can get it right, or wrong.  Life will still go on.  But the answer becomes what you make of it, and if it falls on the wrong side, you won’t be around to argue anyways.

It's for us.

People used to call this the end of the world, but it’s nothing but the end of us.  The world will always go on, we’re just too quick to forget that.  I can remember the look in people’s eyes when they realized this, long and hard they fought to convince themselves otherwise.  I had to watch a lot of men struggle with holding onto what they now know couldn’t be true, that whatever this is, it’s meant for us, and it won’t end ‘till we’re all gone.  It’s these profound horrifying consequences that were our undoing, because there just isn’t any escaping it, only acceptance.  The ranks that were left (if any) feel quickly, and ‘every man for himself’ meant something again.  As terrible as this is, it pales in comparison to what we did to each other in its wake.  There’s nothing to be done about it though, all you can do is be sharp enough to see this life for what it is and stay ahead of anything that’s trying to take it away.  In the end I know that it will win, that I’ll either make my choice or not be given one, there’s no denying that.  But this hasn’t won yet and we’re still, for one reason or another, keeping up the fight in hopes of something that we might be able to lean on, something that can bring some rest from all this.  At the end of the day, I have to be real with myself, there’s no doubt in my mind that I will keep that up until my end, but the world, it can go on without me….

Hold on - Date Unknown

There’s something about your smile that I will never forget, but that curse is one I chose to bear.  I would rather be tormented knowing that light in my life is gone than never have touched it at all.  Even in these darkest of days when I have every reason to just give up and let it pour into me, it still carries me through.  These memories that we hold are all we have left anymore, so it is important you keep the right ones close.  This is why we fight for them even to the death, because they only live inside of us.  I’m not ready to let your smile die yet, I’m not even sure I ever will be.  Regardless it has taken me this far and I have no intention on giving up a good thing.  A curse it may be, carrying you around inside of me like this.  But it’s a curse that has kept me alive, and even in my worst battles I can remember your softness guiding my blows so they were true.  When we were together, the world stopped and anything we wanted was at our finger tips, because all we wanted was each other.  I still reach out for you in the night, and each time I’m crossed again by the loss and knowing the dream I was in is the closest I’ll ever be to you again.  As long as I am here though, I’ll keep on dreaming and that last place you're still alive will be with me, safe…  For now that’s good enough for me.

Simon is hurt

They've been closing in on us for a few days now and we’ve been moving as fast as we can, but Simon’s leg is broken and each day he’s getting worse.  We don’t have a whole lot of time to rest, the next stretch is fields and flat ground for a few miles so we need to take advantage of that while we can.  It’s becoming apparent that Simon’s condition is not improving and the prospects of recovery aren’t promising. Already I can see him showing the signs of infection and sepsis, without medicine he’s done.  It won’t be long until we have to address this reality and decide what to do.  These things are never easy, and Simon has been with us for a while now.  We will miss his hand in our struggle, but we will not let him be the end of us.  It’s never easy to have these conversations, the kind we never used to have.  None the less we’re forced to see things for what they are, that is if you want to stay alive.  There’s always a question of whether we tell him or not, if there’s any merit in giving him a choice in how it goes down. Sometimes it’s best to do the right thing, to end it for him swiftly when he least expects it.  There’s been plenty of time when we’ve given people the choice to be left behind alive and hope for the best.  But leaving people like that to become just another corpse…. Well, it’s never sat well with me.  Not just because it adds one more body to the problem, one more dead to walk and chase us through these woods, but because it’s an awful thing to do to a person.  To leave them to find the answer to the question we’re all terrified to figure out…  What it’s like to become one of them…

We’re going to have to start climbing when we reach the hillside and it won’t take us long to get to the cliffs where we can rest.  Once we get there and everyone can see how bad it’s getting, that’s when we’ll do it.

Simon is dead

Simon is dead.

After all the worrying I had done about having to take care of him myself, he saved me the trouble...  Last night he snuck away from us long enough to make his way to the cliffs and he jumped.  I always knew Simon was smart, we both knew a fall like that wouldn’t leave anything to bring back, and he knew the burden he’d become on us.  Like a real man took his death into his own hands, rather than cower in fear of when one of us would turn and do what needed to be done.  It is indeed a shame that we’ve come to this, but some comfort can still be found in moments like these.  When men do what is right.  It’s is the hardest thing to find these days, there is no reward for morality, and the only justice left is what you make your own.

The Price - Date Unknown

It’s the pure things we’ve lost. 

Bravery, valor, honesty, good will. 

They don’t mean what they used to, if anything at all.  Like most other things in the wake of this, they've been sucked into the void, lost to futility and nothingness.  The hardest part of all of this is dealing with just how little I can do in the face of this awful landscape,  how even the best in me isn’t bright enough to keep us out of the dark.  That despite my efforts to hold onto the best memories of how things used to be, they’re dead and gone when I am.  They’re part of us, and as this awful thing takes its course, it will not separate us when our time finally runs out.  I suppose at the same time there is some comfort in knowing that.  Along with all we’ve built and are so afraid to lose, so will the worst in us be destroyed.  The savage, the cruel, the greedy.  Maybe that’s the price we're paying for bearing such awful children, for letting the very worst of us run rampant for generations.  This is the cost denying our own darkness, and our inability to stop it.  Now the brave charge to die in pointless deaths, valor goes unseen, honesty gets you killed, and good will drains the very life we try to hold onto.  There’s nothing to be found in anything less than the selflessness of survival, and perhaps that is the only pure thing we have left anymore...

Growing Old

Growing old has nothing to do with growing up. 

I’ve heard the most pure ancient wisdom spill from the lips of children, and I’ve seen the most foolish of old men and their foolish flock let the whole world burn around them expecting to be saved from the very flames they set.  It’s not divine intervention, and it sure isn’t blind luck, the grand mystery is that there is no mystery.  The truth behind it all has always been right in front of us. 

We’re just been too terrified to let ourselves see it. 

Except those like you and I of course, the few that have always seen something wrong with the way the world is and have known nothing more than to try and stand up to this nameless grand injustice.  Our numbers have never been many, and even fewer still have the courage to fight for what’s right anymore.  I’ve lost so many brothers and sisters to this that I stopped counting a long time ago, but it’s never has been a game of numbers though, our continuing existence is the purest of proofs to this truth.  We’ve never been afraid to hide in the darkest of shadows and bide our time, alone in wait for our chance to strike.  The others have always been afraid of this, that’s why they franticly point their lights into the dark trying to root us out, but they’re always too terrified to look in the most awful of places and that’s where we’ve always been waiting for them.

The blows of truth have always been the most devastating against our enemy, and those trying to deny it are always shaking in terror at the mere thought of having to endure even one.  It’s in this power where our numbers become meaningless, because we need only one of us to make it through, and we still have plenty more than that ready to die trying. 

All of our purest forms have become so fragile though and this makes it so easy for us to let them fall apart and get lost along the way through our lives.  After losing the fight for so long now, I can’t really blame the ones that stand against us.  There’s something that feels so impossible about keeping up this fight in the face of such awful odds.  But for myself, and those like me, there is no choice in the matter.  We cannot cage this beast, this bloodlust for injustice and the fight for those everyone else seems to throws to the wolves.  Never has the need been greater than now, things are as bad as they’ve ever been and despite the fact that they will no doubt get worse, we’ll never give up, we’ll never stop fighting, there is nothing that can change this. 

Even our defeats, they cannot stop this rhythm once it has begun.  When you stand up for something greater than yourself it finds a way of living in all of us, and even though they can put us down one at a time, they’ve never been able to stop those who will take our place when we’re gone and fight for what’s right.  This is our plight, to march into a certain death with a purpose so many spend their whole lives looking for but are too terrified to take hold of.

Those who stand against us, they’re caught up in the luster of false promises and easy answers.  After all, it takes courage to walk into the dark and so few carry that kind of courage with them.  This is why we’ve always told the story of the hero.  To hold those virtues at a comfortable distance just out of the reach of responsibility, and to hope that when the time comes, one will come along to save us all.  That’s never been the way things have worked though, and if there is only one thing that all of this has taught me, it is that our salvation lies within, and the only way out of this is to dig deep and find what we can in ourselves.…

Charles - Date Unknown

He died cold and alone.
Though these days few are that lucky.
Most spend those last moments clutched in the horror, the pain, and are left cursed to walk until someone like me comes along to end their nightmare.

Out here though, he found the kind of peace we all wish we could have in those last minutes.
He had the courage to end his war once and for all.
Though I admire the end he has chosen for himself, it's not one I care to call my own.  Still, for a split second I envy his resolve, and just as quick my mind is flooded with the reasons I can't end up like him.
There's no doubting my end is just around the corner, and I'm starting to see things the same way he must have before he took his way out.

He didn't leave very much behind for me, but I take what I can and thank him for that much.
He reminds me how we really don't get to mourn the dead like we used to.  Now we pick at their bones for what little they have left to keep us alive another day, to prolong this horrible nightmare.
Too often I've turned my back on the screams of those who couldn't be saved so I could save myself, and for so long I've told myself that this is the way the world is.With so much loss around us, you can't think about it for too long without the sickening feeling that pours into your stomach, and that's one thing we do not have time for out here.  I suppose if there's one lesson to learn from his choice, it's that there is always another way out.

There's isn't a thing living or dead for miles.
His body's undisturbed and hasn't been gnawed on by something awful yet.
He chose this spot well.
He knew exactly what he was doing.

I'm compelled to take a moment to say goodbye to another brother in arms, to try and remember why we used to honor the dead, so maybe we could draw strength from their passing.  After so many have died in the most futile vanity, it becomes senseless and sooner or later, just reflex.  With so little behind me, and nothing on the horizon, maybe a reminder of our humanity is exactly what I need.  It's this reminder I thank him for the most, because it's more valuable than any weapons or food he could have left behind for me.

Then again.

The more people I come across just like him, they only carve deeper into the void leave nothing to fill the profound sense of lost that soon follows. Nothing but  a reminder that sooner or later I'm going to be lying right where he is.  Cold...and alone