We are The Last

We are the ones, every last one of us, we are each individual one, and many, all at the same time. A tiny part of our lives is vested in that of another. A tiny part of their life rests in ours. Day in and day out, our lives intermingle and bounce against each other. We, this body of people and existencies are the brownian particles of history. No rhyme or reason, but still we affect, in our own tiny way, everyone else who ever shall exist. And throughout time, throughout all of existence as we have recorded it, we have watched as the pendulum of thought and control has swung between Augustus to Pelagius and back. We watch, still, as the oscillations diminish and waste away. At last, in the very near future, that pendulum will slow and stop and still, and move no more.

And now, unlike at any other point in human history, we have nothing. No spark, no industry or drive to throw our hand to the pendulum and begin the cycle anew. There is no cleavage here upon which we can depend or hang our hopes. We have not even the indignity and horror of oppression, for even the hope of cruelty and untold suffering can spur us to move. There is nothing, and for that, for once, we are grateful. We stand alone, at this point, khorosho, all well and good, and in a place where neither happiness nor sorrow are matters for concern.

For more time than we can properly comprehend, humanity has acquired the veneer and sheen of what we have come to call civilisation. Throughout all of the centuries, we have strived (Sp?) and sought. Above all else, this is the mark of human endeavour. We suspected, supposed; we had above all the suspicion that there was a heaven, something beyond this. It mattered not whether that heaven was a better role in life than the one that vicissitudes of fate had assigned us, or whether it was a place beyond this life that we could go and there reach some state of bliss that was unknowable on this water covered rock. But in suspecting that heaven we all strove, and held our hands outwards and upwards in hope. Without something to keep that faith and passion alive, like anything else that goes untended in a harsh climate, it has been overpowered. Beaten down by the weight of the information we bury ourselves in. Suffocated by the million different things we have put between ourselves and [lsdknf]. And without that, we have no cause to strive.

Mankind, humanity, all of us. We are on a plateau now, one from which there shall be no movement, no great breakaway. Nothing, no step change, we have come through that phase now, where our ingenuity ran away with us and carried us breathlessly into the sky and deep into the bowels of the earth. Where the forces of political upheaval as people's faith in progress and hopes for themselves, their children, and their greater descendants clashed with those from others all over the world. We fought and argued. We suppressed and oppressed in equal measure, as the ebb and flow of power within countries and around the planet left entire peoples bobbing in the wars and revolutions and movements that follow power as surely as our night still follows day, after eight thousand years of civilisation.


And gradually, so gradually now, the waves of power that washed over humanity have levelled themselves out. The planet is becalmed. There is not so much a peace, as a simple absence of conflict. As the world became smaller and more interconnected, so did wars and conflict and our power grabs. And by degrees, by the tiniest of steps, we have teetered away from the precipice of oblivion, and instead, we are here. This place, where there is nothing, except an endless procession of days stretching into the future, that look far too much like this for any one man to comprehend and not take his own life in the face of such futility. The fury that we should feel in this cultural wasteland is gone. It is the most specific absence in our lives Without our faith in progress, we have no imbalances of power. Without those imbalances of power, we have no great suffering, meaning we have no great men.

Instead of tending to entropy, we have tended to mediocrity, and here we sit now, not the middle children of history, but the last. The last children, for all of those who come after us will be the same. They may have different faces and different names, but this, this is the last chance for them to be different people. Within a generation, we will have lost everything that will let us climb out from here. This is, the end. We are The Last.

Smash. Glass tumbles. Spinning through the air, end on end, the shards arc away, glittering and flitting and flying through the early spring light coming through the main windows. The tinkle and patter as it lands is a contrast to the brutal sound of the pane smashing and breaking, en route to violation.

Deep breath. Push down. Pull the arms back. The wave of nausea rising up like a tree growing through me in fast forward, a hundred years of growth in a few seconds. The french doors rattle backwards against the frame as I lean back and instinctively try and extricate myself. I fight the natural urge and try and force myself to relax. I can feel the blood in my temple. Glass tumbles through the air. The house is quiet, one of those rare occasions I'm left to my own devices. Probably for the best if I'm honest.

Force myself to relax and push down again. I should have used the floor bolts to stop the doors moving about. Well, maybe next time. The ridiculousness of the thought made me laugh, even now. Around my feet, the blood pooled, seeping into the carpet, warm and slippery. It sluiced down the partial pane and onto the frame, dripped and flowed unevenly from there, some of it finding its way back onto the frames below, coating them as well. It's surprisingly sunny today, a rare piece of azure in the sky instead of the usual slate grey. Doesn't help my finality any though. [here I could exert myself, my final power, a final act.]

My head lolled forward as I saw the first of the black patches cross my vision. Had to stay upright, till I went properly. I knew that when I fell while my hands were still grasping for the world on the other side of the glass that the wood and glass would shatter more, ripping and tearing at what was left of my arms. Tendons would shread, muscle would divorce from bone, ligaments shorn. The more thoroughly I blacked out the less likely that the final coup de grace as I went forward through the rest of the glass would wake me up. The benefits of forward planning; and bitter experience.


It's
not
likeillrem

with a jerk I came back from the semi conscious tilt. My breath inhaled sharply and chillingly through lips as the glass in my forearm bit in unexpectedly.

“Elizabeth? What are you...”

An inrush of wind and dust and leaves as my mother rushes in, dropping the shopping bags. I her the eggs crack as they land. She'll be mad at me for that later, ifI


My eyes open again I feel hands, arms under mine, supporting the weight, trying to lift me off the glass that's jutting into my arm like an iceberg, the rest of the doorframe under the water, it certainly looks that way nowflooringfloodingandflyinginblackandwhiteand

“Oh my god, please, please hurry. My baby girl, my Elizabeth, my...”

My eyes open again. The ceiling rose is dirty. I wince at the fabric biting into my arms below the elbow. My eyes close.

My eyes open again. And again and again. And now it's the height of summer, the day before my 18th, and I lay here in the pristine hospital bed, the nurses fussing brusquely around me. They know why I was here. The severed tendons and brutalised muscles in my arms are, truly, honestly the least of that girls problems, I don't know why she did it, poor thing, I mean look at her, I wish I looked like her, as if that was the only thing that mattered, that they could never understand, my inability, my failure, my fucking bitter, bile spitting failure, to bring something, anything, that burned with the fire of the new, that would scorch the sky and tame the earth because it was fresh in a way that made people's heads spin and minds reel. I sighed again and slept.

My eyes open again. It's the feel of the last big weekend before the weather turns and our clothes turn longer and warmer and hide our bare flesh away from prying, inquisitive eyes. Three weeks out of that bad, and my legs are still unsteady, far unsteadier than my mind is now. They betray me and wobble and wave, and they're not helped by this deck that holds prying, inquisitive eyes. Eyes who stand on the other side of the bar on the boat on the river and don't even look abashed as they stare at my arms, for once not hidden by sleeves or some other tailor's trick of gauze, and linen and artfully, and doesn't she look so elegant? Clumsily covered with makeup, concealer misnamed, my exposed upper limbs are a call to abuse, none of it original, none of it new, and none of it knew, not really, what you go through to get there, unless I'd been in some terrible vehicular accident, and even at that it was rude to make assumptions and ruder to point and look and everything else, and even ruder to, oh fuck it. I threw the drink, glass and all over the rail, it splashing gently, can't even tell if it smashed, probably from this height above the water. Looking, I couldn't see the glass, but I could see, just about dispersed the bloodstain it had left in the water, before the holy baptismal of the river washed it away, diluted and eventually draining away into the ocean. A snigger from the eyes on the other side of the bar. I put my weight on the ball of my foot and let the world rotate around me, and walk off the boat, stupid boat on the river. I sigh. I'll sleep later.

My eyes open, and even from my bed, I can see the blink, blink, blink and flicker of the lights in the city from our house, this creaking pile atop the hill north of the city. We're safe here now. Safer now there's less glass. And don't think I don't see that the kitchen drawer locks, mother. As if I'd resort to that depth of cliché. You don't understand it, you never have. It must be late in the night, or very early in the morning. I don't quite get when it switches from being one to the other, they flow uncomfortably into each other in a way that makes me easy. Delineate, deter from ambiguity, much preferred. Outside though, there's a bird who's singing, something cheerful about the need to feed his family. Ambiguity is probably better considered when you don't need to worry quite so fucking much about where your next meal is coming from. The glow over the back of the horizon tells me that the sun will be coming up soon, and I will face another day.

Consequence, follows action, regardless of intention, and by any intentions and rhyme or reason I should not have been here. I should not have been able to lift, and drink from, and caress the cold stem of, my breath condensing against the side of, that glass that ended up in the river, spilled any unhappy, and empty, no longer half full or half empty just a thing, an empty vessel.
`
Ever since I was born, or at least since I stopped being a solpisist, I started to corrode. I might start retreating back into that, maybe I already have. How would I even know? But I suspect, strongly suspect, and it burns, and hurts a little every time I think it, that no-one else feels like this. No-one, in the history of the world, in hundreds and thousands of millions of people, has ever felt this way. How vain.

Every day I decay a little, and with each passing minute and second and hour, another slice, slice, slice of my life, my existence, my whole is lopped off. We call this living, and we do it because we must. There is more than intent, more than just being, and more than just living. That's what the others could never understand, that's why we fought bitterly, tears and hoarse throats, drained and empty, hollowing inside out. The road to hell is, as they say, paved with good intentions, and that's why well meaning actions that result in nothing – well it's nothing short of death. Bad intent, the worst intent that you have in your darkest, bitterest moments, that results in beauty is far beyond death, because the dissonance is too great for us to handle, to comprehend. Now I realise, as the seconds and minutes and hours are shaved away that they lack a something the others call life, experience, living.

Through the window, I should have shut the curtains before retreating to bed last night, every night, I do it and every morning I wake before dawn, even in the grey wasteland we call weather, before dawn and wonder why I didn't do it. But through the window, and through the haze, the sun is audaciously starting to creep over the horizon off to the side of the city. Soon light will stream into windows, and people all over the place will blink, and yawn, and throw off their comforters and comforts and push themselves out into the world for another harsh day. Protecting themselves by insulating themselves from feeling, coating the wire. Inert glassware to carry the vicious acids.

If it has to be, then our – my – entire purpose has to be, as we corrode and crumble into nothingness every day, that we make something new. All of my intentions must be devoted to that end or we are all for nought, regardless of what the others, the faceless, and the leader may do to us. Even under the heaviest burden of oppression and influence we can still create that something new, something special, the original from which all others are derived. That, and only that can give the hours and seconds and minutes value, and meaning, and purpose.

I sigh. For now, I sleep.