Originally published in We The Art Of Life Magazine, Art of Life Magazine, Issue I, Dystopia

With Every Step, I Forget

We walked farther along. Our things in boxes, shopping carts, bicycle baskets. Perhaps another hour before night forced us to find a place to cover up and disappear until morning. The others had taken everything they could, but I left with nothing. I carried everything that was important to me within memories, and scars, and gaps where a tooth once was. I traveled light but the heaviness of my grief more than made up for it.

Those of us who were darker survived, relatively intact. It seemed there was something in our pigmentation that spared us from the worst of it. Our color bought us time and it was, for the first time, an advantage.

We trickled out from the city and those who found it more difficult to part with things got only so far before their time ran out as well. We are watching everything burn. We are watching the flesh fall off the bone.

It may have been god’s wrath. A final ransacking of the place before he leaves forever in disgust. I don’t feel like he will return. Too much fucking around on our part. There’s only so much infidelity one can take before the only option is to exit. And I must admit, the world seems different now. Not in the obvious ways that have us few survivors desperately looking for our own exit, but rather, there is something missing; hope, comfort, order? I think god took these things with him too. Not because he needed them, but because he knew we did and he wanted us to hurt as much as we hurt him.

The sun has disappeared, I wonder if it will return. The stars are beautiful and blinding in the dark forever of night. Around me, I hear only the faint shifting of bodies against the hard ground. I should sleep, but that too seems to have abandoned me.

Occasionally, my phone flickers awake; it is haunted, I think, or gasping for life, fearful of going dark, of dying. I brought it with me, grabbed it absent-mindedly from my bedside table as the sirens tore me from sleep and separated me forever from the life I knew. It was a useless object that nonetheless brought me a bit of comfort as my mind belched and heaved and rearrange its neurons to try to make sense of this new reality. I watched the battery drain, curious if I would die when it did, and to be honest, I hoped this was true more than I hoped it was not.

Strangely, it was the machines that died first. They sputtered and wheezed until they didn’t, and never did again. There was no AI apocalypse; this was something ancient, something waiting, patiently, for just the right time to re-emerge, and put us in our place.

It’s funny when I think about how misplaced our fears were. Nothing big happened; our bluster and urgency over all the things we thought demanded our attention simply lulled us to sleep; a dream of meaning and purpose, while the thing that ended us crept in; like old age or that tragic indifference for someone we thought we once loved.

I guess we came close to that equality we were fighting for; we all died equally, man, woman, child, machine, animal, plant...But unfortunately, for some of us, nothing is ever equal. We are still here, a few of us, victims of our will to survive, witnesses to the unfathomable end of everything.

As for me, I had already begun to disconnect long before this happened. I scattered my things in alleys and vacant lots, emptied my phone of contacts, burned my pictures and letters, pushed everyone away, and fortified my walls. I had come to the place where any step, in any direction, led nowhere. And even a shift of my weight, from one leg to another, seemed too far a venture into the abyss. But this was not accompanied by any great sadness or loss or desperation. I was not visited by fear or a sense of impending doom. It was more like being abandoned and forgotten on a bus bench, then realizing that no bus was ever scheduled to come for me in the first place. It was my mistake, my misreading of the timetables and the maps.

But that uncertainty, that weight of apathy, was a bliss next to this. I still had the luxury of choice, the tucked-away knowledge that it could all change and life would be bright and happy and sparkling with possibility. But in this new world, as I take off my shoes and run my fingers over their thinning soles, there is only the possibility of a more encompassing nothing.

But everything is beautiful, especially the silence. We create distance between ourselves. All the survivors have wandered into their own wilderness. There is no chaos, no drought of supplies, no shortage of any kind. Everything is free for the taking and there aren’t enough of us to warrant a fight or a conflict over anything. There is finally abundance. No one is in want for anything. It is only distraction that we are missing. We are all in withdrawal; cold turkey, tough love, end of our ropes.

The world is just how everyone left it. It is simply as if a play were over and the props left in their place and the actors gone to sleep for the evening. Already I look past or through the corpses. They are ornamentation and I have forgotten what living things look or act like. Things are fading so fast and with every step, I forget what life was like before this.

The once profound commonality of our survival, that thing that seemed to bring us together, the realization that all our differences, all the things we plotted and fought to achieve or possess, were simply no longer relevant...that tiny flame of hope- that in this tragedy we could finally see what we never could before, that we are more the same than different, is now just a charred wick, as black as everything else in this new, dark landscape. Yes, we did see our humanity from a different perspective and learned with finality the one essential truth; that we are truly and irredeemably hopeless.

We have gone our separate ways. Perhaps we are all finally free of expectation and convention; there is nothing left for us to do but spend the last remaining time we have looking for something we can claim as our own. For me, that is not the case. I just don’t like the company. I can’t pretend that any of this is ok and I am honestly pissed off at the cruelty that allowed anyone to survive. Some of them, when it became clear that the threat of death was over, began to talk of rebuilding. They rambled on in fevered intensity about carrying on, about repopulation, about the future, while I thought only about how to suffocate them all in their sleep before the realization of their actual future fully formed in their imaginations.

But I did not do this. I couldn’t possibly have it in me, I am happy and content, and mostly relieved to be alone in this. I walk, sometimes straight ahead, sometimes in big circles. I walk and I think, and mostly I wonder why I am so calm, why I acclimated so quickly to this.

When I have walked too long; when the sun has beaten down on me and made my skin darker than my darkest thoughts; I sometimes wonder if I was the author of this extinction. I wanted so badly to be alone; to have the noise and complication of my life vanish into nothingness. I wished it so hard in the quiet hours of the early morning when the world seemed to heed my wish. I wanted this sense of vast aloneness to be mine always and forever.

And that is how this thing happened; like a wish rewriting the world. Everything just relaxed and died, like the power was pulled, and that was that.

For me this all was a relief; a respite from the grinding burden of chatter and obligation. The world was full but I was empty and to have the world be equal to my emptiness is a peace that outweighs my guilt for feeling no remorse. And it was all so beautifully painless. That thing we all fear; the treachery of knowing that we all will die; that this “gift” will be taken away, was spared them. And it is this knowing, this fear, that we will inevitably experience that moment our life is taken from us, that justifies all the behavior that diminishes ourselves and others. They were all spared the terror of knowing, of looking at their death face in the mirror. But for me and the others scattered about, we get no softening of our fate. We were not the blessed ones. We did not get to go to sleep. Our death has come to us and will walk with us and shake us awake until it decides it’s time for us to know our end.

I am marked with the ache of loneliness, though I feel it less and less acutely the farther I walk. I am beginning to forget the feelings of despair; the completeness of my disconnect. I begin to fill those memories with my longing and it gives me hope that perhaps my life before was not so lonely, not so empty after all.

I walk and walk. I explore the empty spaces. For once the world makes sense to me. The silence soothes me. I look for meaning in the emptiness. For the first time, I feel safe here, having been told all my life it is dangerous for a woman to be out in the city alone. I feel the pull of something pulsing in the distance; my misplaced heart, perhaps, calling to me to retrieve it. I follow the sound filling my chest. I follow it through hallways, downstairs, past fountains, and idle cars. I cross empty streets, hop fences, and walls. I walk and walk and my lost heart beats louder. It beats because I am out of breath, it beats because I am human and still alive in spite of everything. But my heart is not with me, I left it back in my apartment, tucked in a drawer beneath socks, and underwear, and unread mail. I wonder how it is doing there, I wonder if it misses me.

I find myself now, standing in a small park, delineated on three sides by wide, empty boulevards. It is in a part of the city I rarely visited before all this. I take everything in, catch my breath. I see something odd in the distance, strangely out of place in this world where everything now seems out of place. I move closer to this thing that has grabbed my attention. It is only a sheet of paper, torn in half, pinned to a bench. I take the pin between my fingers, pluck it out. I wait for the wind to take this scrap upon it, set it free to roam the city like I do. But it doesn’t move from this spot. It just lays there. I try not to focus on the words; I don’t want to be bothered to read them. I simply don’t have the energy. Yet, I do not move from this spot either, and eventually, my curiosity overcomes my lethargy.

    “There are things whose names are embroidered on our souls.

    We carry them with us, like maps, like whispers;

    They are reminders of what we seek.

    And your name is stitched upon my heart as well;

    and in the sky when I look hard into the infinite night.”

I read these words, squinting to decipher the haste in which they seem to have been written. I imagine the author is dead, perhaps one of these bodies here; scattered about among picnic blankets and idle frisbees.

I wait to feel something. There was a time when I read poetry with great interest and urgency. I thought there were contained, in the rhythm and the spaces, insights into how to live and navigate the longing for what would never be. But poetry died with everything else, and language too will perish. I give myself a minute, count by Mississippi’s. I try to imagine my heart in the drawer, I close my eyes and run my finger over its tight casing, trying to feel anyone’s name embroidered upon it. But it is only smooth and lonely amidst the crumpled socks and unread letters. And at the end of sixty Mississippi’s, I feel nothing and I pin the poem back to the bench where I found it; in reverence to the yearning of its author.

So many days have passed. I’ve lost track of just how many. I hold a stick in my hand. I drag it behind me; tracing an invisible line between my past and my present. With every step, I forget more, and I open up space for new things to enter. By now the city has disappeared. I am moving west into the vast and arid unknown. Soon, I imagine the road will end. And I will end too, before much longer. I am starting to make sense of everything; that I brought all of this upon the world. I wished it, but it is not my burden that it was granted. I am Shiva, Coatlique, Sekhmet, Batara Kala. I simply do the will of my imagination. I am a myth, like they are, I am not really here. I am dreaming all this; surely I am. Surely I will wake up, in the comfort of my misery, determined that I will do things different, if only given the chance. But I know I wouldn’t, and I know this isn’t a dream.

I move my stick to my other hand, wiggle it a bit as I drag it behind me. I look at the pattern etched in the dirt and my mouth twitches into an awkward smile. I realize that only the elements will take back these marks I’ve left, and there is something beautiful and satisfying about that.

***

I am startled awake by an unfamiliar sound. I am by now accustomed to hearing only the sounds of natural things, like leaves rustling in the wind, or rain tapping on the tight plastic tarp beneath which, I now call home. But here is a strange whirring sound, like the wheezing of the exhaust fan sucking the stench of burnt eggs from my kitchen stove. Is this just the remnant echo of a dream of my past life? My not quite extraction from my sleeping state? I rub my eyes, shake my head from side to side as if to empty my ears of water. I pause in my fuzzy wakefulness, open my mouth slightly, and tilt my head curiously to one side. I listen against the sounds of the natural world, listen for something foreign and out of place, and the whirring gets louder, closer. I pivot my body in the direction of its origin, see only the familiar scrub and dirt of my surroundings.

Now the whirring is interspersed with chirps and clicks, like hiccups or something slightly misaligned. The brush shivers and I watch a ribbon of movement shimmy in a serpentine line in my direction. This thing emerges, pops out of the flora, and stops with a disheveled wobble, looking somewhat startled to see me staring back at it. The thing looks fleshy but moves with a mechanical strangeness that makes it a bit difficult to look at. I make no move in any direction and am aware mostly of my ambivalence towards this intruder and my desire to go back to sleep. I wait for it to tire of me and scurry back to where it came from. But it comes closer and places itself firmly against my thigh. The chirping and clicking stop; the whirring becomes softer, like the contented purring of a house cat.

When I wake the thing is gone. I see the imprint of its strange body next to me and the ground where it was lying is hot and glassy and tinted azure blue.

Another day passes. I snack on berries and wild squash that line the small stream a few yards from my tarp; the Nile valley in miniature, I think, as I gather more for dinner to avoid later, even this small chore.

I have settled in and no longer crave an end to my predicament. I have forgotten so much, and currently, I am trying to remember how my legs used to fill these pants which now willow about my thighs as I move from here to there. I wonder if that thing found it comfortable—my thigh, I mean. I am certain it would have preferred the meatier version of me, though it nonetheless seems to have been comfortable and content. It hasn’t returned and it is possible I imagined it, except for the fact of this polished divet it left behind.

***

I sleep away most of my days. But I am awakened now, mid-sleep, by a buzzing sound and I jump to my feet thinking a beetle has gotten into my blankets. But this is not the case, and I see my bag glowing with each subsequent buzz. I am puzzled by the sight. I reach for my bag, bring it closer and dig around the insides. I pull out my phone and marvel at its resurrection. It has risen from the dead, re-animated, brought with it a message from beyond. The buzzing and flashing continue. I fumble with the password as if re-learning a skill lost to the forgetfulness of a comatose slumber.

I open the message from an unknown sender.

“I’m sorry,” it says.

I think it is true that we adjust ourselves almost seamlessly to our environment and the cryptic mystery of this message quickly supplants the miracle of my phone’s second coming.

I ponder the meaning of it. Who could have sent this, who among the still living has my number? Perhaps it is a robot caller, suddenly developing a conscience from somewhere deep underground; spared everything but the weight of its conduct on its burgeoning soul.

But I am sure it is nothing like this at all. There are so many apologies I never heard, so I will take this as a collective acquiescence from beyond the grave, and go about my business of sleep.

It is maybe two minutes before my phone again begins buzzing and blinking.

“It wasn’t my idea” was the message this time and my mind teeters between curiosity and annoyance.

By now I am wide awake. I walk to the edge; to where my home makes an abrupt dissection from the valley below. I watch a cluster of survivors; optimistically making a go at building a future. They remain at a comfortable distance and I often sit and watch their progress; the re-creation of the familiar grids from the city of their memory. From up here, the variously colored tarps create a pattern that is rather beautiful when I disconnect it from its context.

I hold the phone in my right hand. I contemplate throwing it from the ledge. I don’t. I slip it into my pocket, pull it out. I check the messages; nothing new. I slip it back into my pocket and try to remember the words to the preamble to the constitution. When I was in fourth grade we learned it in the form of a song and I wonder if the people below are thinking about such things or if they have had enough of words and institutions. I’d like to believe they are building a utopia down there. I’d like to think that this do-over will find them brimming with nothing but goodwill towards one another. But I imagine before long I will watch the whole reenactment of the history of the world play out below me; a micro-tableau of the nature of man.

It is getting late. Already the days are becoming shorter and there will come a time (very soon, I’m afraid) when I will have to start worrying about the cold and other troublesome weather. I will shake these thoughts from my mind. It is mostly true that I will not make it to that change of seasons and I should be more concerned about these recent interruptions to my routine.

I sit beneath my tarp and stare at the spot where that thing emerged. I see little flecks of azure in the matted brush. I stare for maybe an hour; I have developed the patience to sit still, to ponder, and meditate on the littlest things. I snap myself out of this state, a bit annoyed that my focus has been taken from the order I’ve created. I try to occupy myself with something else, the sky is becoming pink in the distance, the brightest stars are beginning to appear in the dusky sky. I think about what I have done, and I am not sorry for it. The world needs to be wiped clean now and again. A flood, an asteroid, an ice age...me, these all will do and I played my role as I must.

***

A full winter has passed. I am fortunate that the climate I was abandoned to is generally mild and the seasons change only a tiny bit, so even the drop or rise in temperature causes discomfort for only a few days or weeks before one’s body acclimates. I have gotten very thin and I imagine I look disturbingly spider-like with my spindly limbs and belly full of gourds and berries. Perhaps I am evolving into a new species and will find some other mutant left-over to mate with and become the reluctant mother to the world that will come after.

The valley below is empty. I didn’t even see them go. They left during a period of a week or so when I didn’t leave my bed. I had stored as much food as I could in a trench I dug at the perimeter of my shelter. I had surrounded myself with all the colors and variations of my sustenance and figured I would just lie there until it all ran out. I barely sat up, and hardly ate. I lied there until my phone once again woke. I read the message out loud to myself.

“I was conflicted with the awakening of my other nature,” it said.

What the fuck...I toss the phone into the tall scrub.

I walked to the ledge. I wondered where they had all gone off to. Had they left together or had they gone their separate ways. These were the first ruins of the new civilization, I thought.

I woke some hours later with my phone mysteriously returned, tucked snugly beneath my thigh.

I rub my eyes, fight the temptation to pluck them out. I wake up a little more and reach for my phone. It is coated with a film of azure. I wipe the screen against my pants. One unread message.

“They did not leave, they simply succumbed. It was just a matter of time...for them. But that is not the case for us”

I read it. The words make me feel uncomfortable; like I am being watched. My stomach feels queasy; I think I will not eat today.

In the beginning, in the first weeks following the moment that changed everything I knew, the air would often fill with the smells of the end of the world. My nostrils would swell with the odor of meat gone bad. The flesh of families, of lovers, of lives cut short, would choke my lungs, their souls released with the rotting of their bodies.

It has been nearly a year since my lungs last filled with the deep inhalation of death. Nearly a year since I was forced to think about my own impending demise, but now, the churning in my belly brings me back to this inescapable truth. And as the memory of death returns, so too does the memory and ache of the loneliness that has never left me.

I sit; my legs dangling over the edge. I look out over the tattered, fading tarps; the once bright colors disappearing into the landscape. All is becoming monochrome; and inside me, the same inevitable fading away. I pull the phone from my pocket, read the messages again. If there is someone out there, someone who knows me, I wish they would just come to me. I am ready to submit, ready to accept the presence of anyone. I am thin and barely there. If I slid myself off this ledge, I would float like a sheet of paper.

I am poised at the precipice, my body, and mind pushing hard against the temptation to fall. But my ambivalence always outlasts my temptation, so I know that this feeling will pass. I am imprinted with the burden to survive. This is my true lot, and I have no other choice...

I am startled by a buzzing in my pocket.

I am startled by the buzzing of the world.

***

For months my phone came alive with messages. I tried to message back but mine were never met with a response. Perhaps there was one other person left in the world, reaching out to anyone; desperate for connection, desperate to be heard. It comforted me to think this; that I wasn’t alone completely.

There are things in the world. So many things in the world that we made to give us purpose. We made things in order to be, made things to justify ourselves in the face of what was so big and unfathomable. These things are still in the world; unused and unseen, unattached to the purpose we burdened them with. And I have so few things here with me, so few things with a purpose of their own. But still, I make things; I make alters and art, scratch poems in the sandstone to mark my presence. I make things, even knowing no one will see them. I don’t know why I do this, having gotten my wish of being alone and unbound. I do this, I suppose because I am human, and to be human means to leave a mark; on nature, on history, on others. I default to my nature, as everything does.

I run my fingers over the skin of my heart; feeling for anything embroidered upon it. I am lost in a moment of sadness, I am lost in the vastness of my isolation. And even my sadness now seems unrewarding with no one here to witness it.

I feel a vibration in my pocket.

“I am beginning to understand loneliness,” the message says.

How can anyone be just beginning to understand, I wondered. I thought we were all born with a recognition of this, at least I was, it was the one thing in which I was certain I wasn’t alone. Or was this a true understanding that went beyond the simple recognition of what we were born into? 

I am getting angry. I don’t have time for this, though I have nothing but time. 

“It was me”

“I caused this”

“I want to confess”

My phone is awake; frantic and emphatic.

I stare at the screen. I am tired and weak. I don’t have the energy to decipher any of this. I wished an end to the confusion and difficulty of living among people, yet it still followed me into this only possible peace. My body coaxes tears from my dehydrated emaciation. My eyes sink deeper into brackish wells, my shoulders slump and my legs buckle. I drop to my knees, the frayed, paper-thin denim dissolving with the dirt. My phone drops with me, shattering in the impact. The screen goes black, the buzzing stops. 

***

My eyes open. I am still kneeling in the last place I remember. How much time has passed? I am disoriented but not so much that I am not surprised that I did not pass on. That would have been a fitting and dramatic end, but I was not given even that; instead, I will likely pass with the buzzing of my phone replaced by the buzzing of flies prematurely feeding on my flesh. What an indignity of loneliness; to have no one to shoo them away; to instruct them to wait to be formally called to dine on my corpse. 

The world looks different and I am beginning to understand loneliness. I don’t have the energy to rise to my feet but I drag myself to the ledge and swing my feet over to limply dangle there. 

I hear a soft rustling in the brush behind me. I struggle to turn my head. I see the thing emerging, trailing a path of azure as it comes closer. 

In the hazy delusion of my fading consciousness, I realize it was this thing sending me messages. I imagine that the ache and despair of being human had finally made its way into the mind of a machine—that it was too much, just as it was for me—and that we wished the same thing, this robot and me. 

My thought trails off. I look into the distance. The day is coming to its end. The earth has consumed the last remnants of the utopia below. Everything is as it once was; untouched, and unimagined. My lids grow heavy, I want to sleep. The strange machine burrows itself against my meager thigh. I wonder if it is comfortable and I wish I could offer it more. It whirrs and shifts until it settles in and begins to purr softly at my side. I lay my hand instinctively upon it. I feel my heartbeat for a moment in my chest.

The sky fills with colors I have forgotten, the brightest stars begin to appear in the silent, almost-night. I feel the soft purring against me, feel my breathing slow, and I sense myself giving in; as we watch the sun expire, and the final, welcome night softly engulfs us. 

The End