#maybe like.

do you remember everything,  still?   try to recall the feeling of your desk,  smooth wood almost  silk-like  beneath fingertips,  feel more cold stone than warm oak.   try out your ears,  the  click-click-click  of stove burners trying to catch a spark,  and hear the  scrape-scrape-scrape  of your blade against rock,  inescapable.  taste,  recall what your favorite vegetables taste like,  ignore how the only way to count time down here is in hunger  -  can you grasp it all,  still?  or is it lost,  far beneath broken stone and burnt grass beyond the trees?  they call you survivor,  now.   your team,  your classmates,  even trollmarket,  and you can almost  hear  the tale being carved into your own onymity   :   the one who faced the darklands and came back alive,  came back unscathed.   but are you?   alive?    unscathed?    did you come back at all?    what do you see?   what do you feel?   what do you want?    what do you want?    what do you want?    i want to feel like me again. 

you stand empty-full,  all of you or something like it,  memories slipping through the gaps between your fingers.  how do you put this feeling into words?  how do you syllable-sound it into something that makes sense,  puts a  name  to all of this ache,  this longing for warmth,  bone-deep,  to stop the shivering? ❛   i just want everything to be normal again.   ❜    fall back onto the bed,  feel the softness of everything,   the gentle warmth,   and try to ignore the feeling that it’s all wrong,  all slightly off at the edges.  close your eyes and darkness reigns,   again,  less ringed totality and more power outage.   there is a war going on,   didn’t you hear?   not here,   not yet,   but waiting,   watching.   and what is left,   after it is done?   a boy with his hands,  palms empty except for the ash,  the rubble.  a fighter now storyteller,  now poet,  just to have something in the end,  at the borderless close of this day,  of these voiceless streets. 

AND  IT  IS  REDISCOVERY,   you return and everything feels like an electric shock,  the familiarity of it all,  and how it looks more mirage,  more dream.   blink and see home as a savagery,  home out to get you,  home reaching and reaching and taking,  today,  tomorrow,  and the next,  the next,  the next,  bearing and breathing and burning,  while everyone you love turns to stone,  turns sedimentary,  while the lightning cries.   

turn,  twist upside-down on your back,  boyish childhood showing like starlight  -   dim,  but growing.     ❛   do you think it’s possible?   ❜     do you think it’s worth remembering?  they call you survivor,  now,  like an afterthought,  but you are always surviving something.  see sacrificial,  see martyr,  see young boy who still believes in promises.  you think someone asks:  what does it feel like?  this honor?  this burden?  sit still,  think,  answer:  a momentous moment of joy,  followed by a swift strike of grief,  over and over,  again and again. 

Haven't said much (read: anything) about it because it barely exists but the world is similar to Nausicaa or that one mushroom planet from TAZ Balance. Except there are no hiding places. Everything is rotting. Humans are cobbled together with face masks and mechanical lungs and organic laminators. The spores are inside you from birth. They will kill you. People excavate deep into the planet's rotting crust to extract what few resources remain from the long buried cities, contaminating them afresh in the process. A book-obsessed archaeologist of sorts has to seal her finds as quickly as possible and read them page by page using an electron microscope, because exposing them to the air on the surface will rot them instantly. Even still she only has a few hours to get through them before the ink starts to feather into illegibility and the paper starts to crumble.

She hopes that her life will follow a satisfying, cathartic arc, like a story. That humanity's fate will, too. But she knows that it won't. Life does not lie along perfectly themed lines. Most things happen according to natural law, which does not care about human conceptions of meaning.