nobody knows

they say nobody knows what happened. they like to say that. makes them feel in control.

they say that like it's been so long we all forgot. maybe we have. there's a lot we have forgotten, now that the last of the elders is dead.

they say a lot of things with that certainty. nobody knows is their favorite though. nobody knows where the walls came from. nobody knows what happened to the sky. nobody knows if the rest of the world still exists.

well, nobody here knows. we're too far from the walls to investigate. we're too far from the sky to look closely. we're too far from the before to remember it.

but when they say nobody knows, like it's the only universal truth any more, i think they forgot about the library.

most of us don't read any more. it's not like we have time to write new words, and all the old ones are from the before and they aren’t supposed to have any value any more. but some of us still know a few things. some of the elders' children still believe there's power in written words. some of the settlers think so too.

my dad was a settler. was. there's a lot of was in the world today. he was a good man, but not a good settler. he listened to too many elders and their children, and he still believed there was something beyond the walls.

good settlers, good residents, we aren't supposed to think past the walls and the sky and the before. we aren't supposed to be taught to read.

that's probably why nobody goes to the library.

that's probably why nobody ever finds me in here.

in the library there's a woman. she's dead. i decided she was the book keeper. i decided she was even older than the elders. i don’t know why. she's not even half as shriveled as the elders in their burial pits.

still, there's something about her. it's probably the necklace.

the necklace has a heart-shaped locket on it. well, a something-shaped locket. you want a real question nobody knows the answer to? why is that shape supposed to be a heart?

it's a diamond with two lumps. it's a squashed sunrise over the jagged edge of the walls. it's a weird pointy group of curves and lines. it's not a heart.

i’ve seen hearts. i’ve seen the tiny meat pepper of a chicken heart. i’ve seen the fist-sized meat arrowhead of a goat heart. i tore a scorpion apart one time trying to find its heart and i ruined all the meat and i never found a heart. didn't catch another one for four hungry hours. i don't think scorpions have a heart. i don't think anything has a heart that looks like that locket.

but that's what that shape is supposed to mean so i guess it's a heart-shaped locket.

you're supposed to put things in lockets that matter to you. you're supposed to put pictures of your family or a lock of hair or a pretty flower. nobody has any of that any more so nobody has whatever-shaped lockets. maybe that's why the book keeper seems so old. she had something that mattered to her.

my dad didn't teach me everything he knew. i had to learn most of how to read on my own. i had to learn how to learn on my own too. it took a while.

some days are better than others. some days i can stand up and go work. they like it when we work, they say it's how we stay strong and stay together. so, when we work, they feed us.

some days i don't work. usually it's because it's hard to breathe, hard to stand, hard to will myself to do whatever work they have us do that day. so, when i don't work, i have to feed myself. usually that looks a lot like work.

some days though i learn something, and then i don't work because i'm doing a different kind of work.

see, the book keeper's locket didn't have a picture, or a lock of hair, or a flower. it had words.

books

remember

forever

for us

i guess she really liked books. i guess that's why she chose to die with them.

i decided she chose to die.

i decided that anyone who could choose to die had to be special. i decided anyone special enough to choose to die among books knew something none of the rest of us know.

i decided to learn what she knew.

it took a while. some books have pictures that i can understand, some don't. some don't have pictures at all, but they usually have the most information in them. i still don't understand all of them.

there are a lot of things that aren't written about. like why do we have two ways to write the same letter? what does WORD mean that word doesn't? maybe in the before they had time to care about that.

here’s an example: cars. i found pictures of cars and diagrams of internal combustion engines and road maps of a much bigger world than we have inside the walls, and i didn't find one book that explained why they had cars. you got in a car, you went somewhere, you got out of the car. seems like a waste of time.

i read about locks of hair. if you don't have hair, it means you have cancer. or chemo. i think they mean the same thing. i think we all have chemo now.

i read about all of those words in the locket. i was surrounded by books so that was an easy one to start with.

i read about the science of remembering and how we only remember some things and then our mind fills in the gaps. even in the before, nobody knew a lot of things. maybe we'd know more if we let our minds fill in more gaps.

i read about forever until my head hurt. some people think forever is god. some people think forever is impossible. some people think forever is a waste of time. i tried to let my mind fill in the gaps of forever but it just hurt. it's hard enough to think about today. today has troubles enough of its own. i read that. i don't remember where i read it. maybe that's the point.

i don't think i can read all the books in the library. i think it would take more days than i have. i think chemo makes you die too soon. or cancer. nobody knows. they never tell us nobody knows why we die too soon.

i think it would take a lot of people to read all the books in the library. i think that might be a good thing.

i think i understand what the words in that locket mean now.

sometimes our minds can fill in the gaps, like how i can see a rock face and know which cracks are deep enough to have scorpions hiding from the sky without sticking my hand in them all to find out. sometimes we can't do that. that's why we have books.

books do the work of our minds, filling in the gaps of all the things we don't remember. everything in the books is something someone else remembered. something someone else wrote down so our minds wouldn't have to fill in the gaps. something important enough to need to be remembered for a long time. if you look at the oldest book, the words in there go back all the way to forever.

when i read about forever, the only constant is that it hasn't happened yet. it's the next thing after tomorrow. today, tomorrow, forever.

i think that's backwards.

we don't talk about forever any more. we don't really talk that much about tomorrow, even. they say we’re supposed to focus on today, we’re supposed to live in the moment. so we wake up every day and it's never tomorrow, it's always today. a forever line of todays, never becoming tomorrow even once.

the books talk a lot about tomorrow. they talk about living in the world of tomorrow like it's the best thing that ever happened to people.

i think the before was tomorrow. i think we lived too much in tomorrow, and we lost our grip on today. i think tomorrow left because it didn't want to be lived in, and now all we have left to live in is today.

if today is today, and tomorrow was in the before, i think that means forever already happened.

forever, tomorrow, today.

the books don't talk about what came before today, so i don't know what’s next. nobody knows what’s next. but i think we need to remember today. whenever we get to whatever comes before today, i don't want us to rely on our minds to fill in this gap.

that's why i decided to write this book. that's why i'm choosing to die with these books. that's why i'm making my own heart-shaped locket.

it doesn't look like a heart, but if anyone finds it who knows it's supposed to be a heart, they'll know what's in it matters.

before tomorrow

after forever

books remember

today