The Black Hole Dawns a New World

Amara - 3:37pm

I pulled into the parking lot of my apartment complex and let out a long sigh.

What’s the time anyway? It’s 3:37pm. Another day and another dollar of capital enslavement. And another day of the past weighing on my mind.. When will I be free?

I drag my feet to the front door of the entrance, taking my time because the day had truly won. Five stairway steps later and another door waits to be opened. Two more flights of stairs and I’m fiddling my keys into my locked door.

I wish they’d have finished painting this ugly ceiling. All that old, cracked putty spread everywhere. Tacky. But I loved my studio apartment anyway. Comfort is always waiting for me just beyond this big, dark brown door.

Ahhh, comfort. A nap sounds great right now.

I sucked in a sharp breath and stood motionless halfway inside my front door. Is this really happening? Why is he here?! How did he even get in?! Moments went by as we stared at each other, into each other, until he finally spoke.

“Please… please, just listen.” Astin took a slow, deep breath as he shook his head with tears rolling down his cheeks. “I don’t even know where to begin.. I just know that I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry! I didn’t know, I swear! I only thought it was some stupid drama.. He said things that sounded crazy and untrue, but you were in such a weird place! I could never predict what you would do next, and you just didn’t seem like you were ‘all there’. I’m sorry, I don’t mean it like that… It just seemed like he had gotten inside your head or something. I didn’t know what to say to you or do! I was honestly worried, but I tried to stay out of it.. And I did for the most part, but things got out of hand.. I was reckless, and I’m sorry for all the things I told people at work about you. I was in my own dark place, selfish and too concerned with my popularity.. It’s no excuse, I know! But everyone was laughing and making jokes.. talking about you and what could have been wrong with you. I’m sorry.. I really didn’t mean it that way, but.. You seemed fine, and then suddenly you weren’t. And everyone kept coming to me about it, expecting me to join in. It was stupid, but I guess I just cared more about myself than... than your feelings.. They just kept bringing it up over and over.. They wouldn’t stop talking… please.. Please….” He sat back down and hung his head in his hands again.

By this time, I had already shut the door and leaned against the wall opposite from him with my arms crossed over my chest. It was so surreal to watch this man confirm everything that I had feared years ago was farfetched. He cried heavily now, but I kept my eyes locked in on him. Minutes go by, and he stares at the floor.

“Can I just… stay awhile?” He murmured. I hesitated at his request.

“Whatever.” Turning to walk through my short and narrow kitchen that led to the bathroom, I shut the door behind me and bathed for so long that the pads of my fingers turned white and wrinkled. Nothing ran through my mind.

Huh. This is a first.. Silence..

After my shower, I walked past him where he had been left and sat in my sunroom to work on my craft project. While I continued on with my ‘vision board,’ a multi-media canvas of everything I felt described me as a person and my passions, music played:

“Fall in love/ will you stay? I’m begging you for it/ We’re making up, initial way/ ‘Cause I’m closer to the borderline…”

I lost my mind back then. Emotions and nerves out of control. Still so embarrassed of it all.. The next song plays.

“Gotta get right/ tryna free my mind before the end of the world..”

No one really knew what was happening. Hell, even I didn’t know! But what the hell was that energy between us before I got so messed up? I still don’t understand. Two songs later, and..

“Just ‘cause we’re in love/ doesn’t mean that we’re right for each other/ Can’t keep makin’ a home out of you/ just ‘cause you’re asking me to…”

But he smeared me just as bad as Keny did.

“Obsessed” with you?! “Crazy?!” But YOU’RE the one who lingered! I seethed through my gritted teeth as my nerves shook into anxiety and my muscles twitched back into that old fight or flight response. But I quickly relaxed as I remembered the feeling of that deep, silent vibration between us just before everyone got involved and everything got so complicated. They say Romeo and Juliet’s legacy repeats itself like some reincarnation of the Universe joining conflicting forces but only to have the young lovers ripped apart before any fruition could take place.

Well, then, Romeo and Juliet is a nightmare!

Amara - present day

Today is February 24, 2042. Today is the 25th anniversary of the attack. Today, I turned 46 years old. But it’s been just about 21 years since I last saw Astin. Two hours had passed after I left him in my living room alone, but I eventually came out of the craft room to that same dark and quiet space. I had no idea how long he had been gone, but he was nowhere in sight. I caught a note out of the corner of my eye. It sat on the coffee table as if it were waiting for my attention.

“It was always forever.” A small, golden, heart-shaped locket weighted the thin paper down. It didn’t have a chain roped through the pendant, only a small charm expecting a place in my home.

Long before Astin confessed, I had been so emptied and deadened that even the news of Keny’s arrest did not phase me. He was caught after an anonymous friend submitted the tape recorded drug-rape to the police. His attorney argued that Keny never had the chance to learn healthy social skills after isolating himself from a dog attack that ripped open his whole cheek. Influenced by deeply suppressed insecurity, misguided by the chauvinistic attitudes of toxic masculinity, and a growing loathing for women who rejected him, his lawyer continued to argue that Keny was overcome by a brief madness that rationalized rape to satisfy an insatiable craving for something that he was otherwise unhappy to have been refused. Ultimately, Keny was sentenced to mandated therapy and 15 years in prison. However, he only served six of those years after he convinced the parole board that his long-standing good behavior and progress in therapy proved he was a changed man. It only took seven months after his release to be arrested again for rape.

No amount of therapy and self-care could mend my broken heart. Nothing could revive my dead spirit and make me believe in something worth trusting anymore. My own world was consumed with disappointment that bled through the Illusions and luminated the ever-creeping eclipse of these long-time foul plays.

Daybreak began with the MeToo movement when rape survivors outed famed celebrities for sexual assaults, harassment, and intimidation against aspiring actors and athletes. Soon after, old acquaintances and longtime employees of other celebrities came forward with disturbing details of adult men marrying or impregnating prepubescent girls, some of them even close family members. And before long, more men and women outside the industry came forward with their stories.

As this was only the beginning of a tear ripped into reality, more reports revealed atrocious violations such as large sex trafficking rings and child sex exploitation. But it didn’t stop more authority figures in government, housing, clergy, schools, and workplaces from harassing and intimidating people they pushed to perform special favors. In fact, journalists not only found neglected rape kits decades old, but also repeat offenders who had been escaping penalties for many years as well as elitists who had paid off police and judicial officers for lesser sentencing or accommodated prison living.

Suicides hit an all-time high, males and females alike suffering from a toxic rape culture and gender violence that consisted of discrediting survivor stories, magnifying the few false reports, encouraging misogynistic ideals and hypermasculinity, blaming and shaming victims, controlling contraceptive availability as well as the gynecological decisions women can make for their health. Many victims develop trauma disorders and other mental health complications that compromise functional adjustments to the confines of society and thus, relationships have collapsed everywhere. Psychiatric hospital beds quickly filled to capacity as casework overload resulted in staff shortage.

I watched the world burn in hysterics, but they were only reflections of my own former shock and breakdown fading with the ashes. The truth is that they don’t even know.. They don’t know that the world has always been burning. Only now do they see the flames spreading. Wicked Beasts have always hidden in the shadows amongst us; bystanders clenched in cowardice, and Gatekeepers offering more and more pieces of their souls in exchange for silver and printed paper that paid for blissful ignorance. And many walking machines do not even want to know the secrets that disturb their programming.

Today, I stand over an oval-shaped table with fellow guerrillas as we strategize our next plan. We erase the Wicked Beasts and their advocates from a society that the Blind otherwise waits for some fitting punishment that never satisfies or for a god who never comes. The national government has been trying to disband us for years, but we hide in the shadows just as well. No one knows who we are, and we are many. No one knows where we centralize because we are everywhere and live nomadically. No one even knows that each subgroup manages itself.

Vigilante? No. Hero? No. I grew tired of hopelessness and despair, so I… damn. Short on rations again. In hopes we’d expose ourselves for mercy, the government stopped funding for resources and special aid they thought we’d need. But they don’t know we are self-sufficient. Make everyone else suffer? Yeah, you’re a real principled system we can trust..

“Zero!! Six-two-six was ambushed last night! Some nosy neighbor reported suspicious behavior, and they got him in custody now.” That was Forty-seven who spoke. We don’t know each other’s names, only faces and numbers to identify us. The government offers cash rewards to any ‘noble’ citizen who outed guerrilla members, claiming that “bravery for turning in these murderous conspirators who insult the hardworking reputations of the real justice league” is a civic duty fit for the “most dignified patriots.” Billboards read that matters belong in law enforcement’s hands. Advertisements saturated the internet, television, and radio of the President in some exaggerated dialogue with paid actors who were “once afraid to walk the streets with all this warfare going on” but now feel a “safer community” since governmental efforts have captured more of “these barbarians.” How ironic.

“Thank you, Forty-seven. Alright, everyone! Pay attention! Let’s pack up and move northeast. Ex-military gunmen are offering us ammunition and three weeks to stay. Let’s move, move, move!” So long as more spirits fracture in misery and lost souls wander for meaning, the fight for existential liberation from targeted violence will rage on until this ruthless mutant birthed from cultural violence ravages the Wicked Beast into broken and rotted bones. And my golden, heart-shaped locket dangles deep below my neck, beating against my chest with every step I take.

Is it a reminder of the woman I used to know or a memento for that enigmatic magnetism? Maybe it’s just a symbol of the Rising Phoenix ablaze from the core of a fighting spirit. Only the world we used to know dissolves into the new skin of Awakening. And I am not dead yet.