27th September 2022 (Him - Present Day)
I sat looking out of my window as the world crumbled around us. Was there a crushing inevitability to it happening? I don't know. I had always felt that an event like this would happen, and I always knew I would react this exact way. There was no reason to panic about the bad times which were about to come as things weren't all that great before this.
Everything I'd learned about the world came from pop culture. One'd be accurate in assuming that my disposition to frame my life and times based on films I'd watched, books I'd read, or music I'd listened to was down to a lack of figures in my life who showered me with knowledge. In this instance, however, whomsoever made that assumption would be wrong. In my household, there was never a lack of elders who fashioned themselves as elder statesmen. They had stories with morals that seemed to go on for days, if not years.
As a boy, I used to enjoy listening to these tall tales narrated by men and women much taller than myself. Stories about their lives and times seemed so fascinating to me. Even though I didn't grow up to be all that tall with time, I did realize that a storyteller is only as good as the feedback he's willing to take. The people around me seemed incapable of taking any. With every rebuke shot down, and every inconsistency glossed over, I found myself lacking a crucible to test my budding identity.
Then came movies.
Finally, I didn't need to contend with uncooperative individuals. Contrary to popular belief, I didn't find a need to allege my fealty with filmmakers and their views either. The stories were enough. With every new film I watched, my world seemed to expand beyond any realm of possibility. My thoughts and feelings seemed to fall further in line. Every problem had a solution in a tidy two hours. And if there was no solution, I could live past it. Films had seemingly taught me how to pick the sword to fight the good fight and to lay it down.
Even though I could go on for hours about the importance of pop culture in my life, I can tell you that nothing could prepare me for what was to come. Real life, after all, was not Ready Player One.
In all honesty, it wasn't like we did not see this outcome coming. Everything seemed to be teetering on a precipice for the longest time. In a moment of panic, categorized later as self-preservation, the bombs went up into the skies. The sirens signaling the apocalypse went off around the world. "Gentlemen, there will be no fighting in the war room," indeed.
Looking out into the vast expanse, I could see a plume of smoke go up at the farthest corner of my eye. Piercing through the silence was a news broadcast echoing through our house. Bombs had fallen all across the country. In retaliation, bombs were going to fall on our enemies too. A bomb for a bomb makes the whole world go boom.
By this point, I had learned to drown out the noise on the news, especially when I heard more than one head talking concurrently on the broadcast. Even as hellfire rained down on us, it was never too late to get more eyeballs on the product. I did not realize that two other voices had joined the melee of voices blaring out of the speakers. My eyes stood unmoved as they kept looking at the point where the increasingly black skies above met with the seemingly endless stretch of barren land below.
As I began comprehending what had happened, I saw a man run out of the front door. A man not much taller than I was. A man who looked quite similar to me in most respects. A man who I had grown up calling dad. A man who I no longer addressed by that word.
He stopped mid-way between the door and the front gate. He turned around and looked back at the house he'd built over the past five years. It wasn't much in terms of a house, and it never was home. I looked down at him from the window of my room on the first floor. As his eyes scanned around the outer walls, they caught mine. His gaze instantly became piercing and stock still. It is almost as if he wanted me to look at his person as he had done to the house.
My field of vision turned larger in a flash. This man did not fill the frame anymore. He was part of the expanse. He was a byproduct of what had happened to it and everything that led to this outcome. Many lives had ended a few minutes ago. I assumed that I was far out of dodge from the initial fallout. But instances like the one we were living through have a blast radius. Caught in that radius was my mother.
A piece of broken china seemed to become an appendage on my father's hand. It was a curved white triangle with a sharp edge. This appendage was a remnant of a bowl that housed cut fruits from time to time. A streak of blood ran across the sharp edge. A smattering of the same was on his hand.
The space between the makeshift blade and his hand shone white. The midday sunlight bounced off it with such brilliance that it sent out flares. My gaze compelled itself away from the gory truth. It wanted the pure lie.
I had spaced out like this so many times before. Every instance of bad news left me numb. I would look straight at the scene unfolding and seemingly feel nothing. The world would go quiet, and my mind would convince itself of one thing. In two hours, things would be okay again. The current state of affairs would be the new normal. I just needed to live through it.
The film Melancholia taught me that depressed people handle traumatic events better. Kirsten Dunst's relaxed face as the world turned to ashes in front of her eyes was a happy place for me. If that character could do it, I could too. Why overreact to something that was out of my control? Disconnecting from a character's plight after the end credits roll is easy but disconnecting from a horrific incident in real life is something else.
The viscous blood began to move slowly toward the edge of that blade. Following suit were the droplets on my father's hand. The crimson liquid was close to the webbing between his thumb and other fingers. When a drop of blood formed at the tip of that broken bowl and fell to the dry earth below, the clean white space I forced my eye to look at turned a fearsome red. There was no looking away.
As reality began to set in, he turned away from the house. He began walking. He chose to walk into the hellscape instead of waiting for it to come to him. He was a man who dragged us here against our better judgment, saying this was the only way we'd survive an impending apocalypse. The events of today may have vindicated him of his choices.
This man is not a hero. His walk away is not a hero's exit.
I often think of the hundreds of thousands of families who perished that day. Who had it better? Did I have it better for living through this cataclysm? Or did they do better dying with their loved ones while not living to see the mental fractures it would have caused them if they'd survived? It is a question whose answer changes from time to time. Every time I contemplate the answer to this question, the image of my father walking away into the distance echoes in my mind.
Whatever the answer to that question, it doesn't matter in the grander scheme. He understood that. His being right solved nothing and resulted in his mental decay. He'll soon be dead. My mother's being wrong achieved just as much and led to no different outcome.
My being indifferent leads to the same road. They chose to have an agency with their actions while I was but a traveler. They had a journey they embarked on and experiences they took with them. What did I have to show for my years of collection of thoughts? A whole host of personal experiences refracted through a prism of other artists' lived experiences. I amplify small wins and losses to a grand scale through the vision of others. Even as these thoughts swirl through my mind, I sit at a window watching the world unfold. Nothing has changed even though everything has.
As I watched him step further away from the house, my eyes traced back to the initial footsteps leading out of the front porch. His soles left bloody footprints on the wooden stairs leading out of the house. The crimson red steps turned lighter and lighter with each step away until the spot where he paused to look back at the havoc he'd wreaked. A lone drop of blood marked the last bit of attachment he had to this place.
Dust began to cover the next series of footprints he left with every passing second. Soon it will almost be as if he never existed. As he disappeared into the ether of time, I saw a car burst past him at a speed that was an inverse of his languid walk. The dry earth the car moved with its tires covered the footsteps quicker than nature's due course. She was here. She was coming to be with me.
The streak of dust rising behind her beloved Mercedes shielded me from looking at my father's final footsteps. Her arrival was the only thing that would have helped me move at this juncture. Seeing her racing towards me could finally make my toes twitch. My eyes refocused on the glass in the window. I saw my messy hair and pulled it back away from my forehead. She likes me when I don't hide my face. For her, I won't.
END OF CHAPTER
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