A Single Beam of Light

It is difficult for people to understand the alphabet is arranged in no particular order. Perhaps more difficult still is the understanding the universe and our world has been shaped in no particular order. Order is an artifice. Shape an illusion. Everything scatters in random patterns. It is our minds that seeks unity and therefore we see it everywhere. Through the eyes of the viewer order, pattern and shape are arranged. So why then I thought? Why can’t I see it anymore?

I kept looking for something. Some small thing to organize my understanding of the world. Something that makes it seem more meaningful. Before the dark came people spoke of love. I’m not sure what love is but I think it might be what motivated my mom to lay over me and my brother when the flash came. I lay in the soft folds of her blouse with my eyes closed tightly. I could feel her heart pushing into my cheek then receding away. There was order there but then it stopped. I waited there until it went cold. I opened my eyes pushing from darkness into more darkness. The flash had taken the sun and my mother away. It took my illusion of order and pattern from the world. I think it took love. Reaching to hold my dead mother’s hand I felt inter-tangled in her fingers a small chain weighted by a heart shaped locket. Inside is a picture of me and my brother. I couldn’t see it. I remembered what it used to look like. When I traced my fingers along its smooth edges I felt something in my heart.

I had this feeling again when I traced my hands along Ellie-Anne’s gentle face. I found her in the darkness. She appeared like a formless glow in a pixelated screen. I wasn’t sure I had seen her or if she was really there but as I came closer I could see light in the outline of her atoms. After the flash we lost our sight but we can sense and at times with Ellie-Anne I can almost see. Ellie-Anne told me she couldn’t see me but she knew I was there. No one knows how many survivors of the flash there are. The council made it that way. The council formed to kill off every last remaining person. I don’t know for sure but I heard before the flash people would kill off diseased deer so that the disease wouldn’t spread. The council are diseased now too. No one could avoid the flash. When they are sure no one is left they will turn their weapons on themselves-but who can really know? Only the council will be left to decide. Because no one knows who the council are the safest assumption is that all other people will kill you.

If our world was patterned by intersecting channels of human connection then all pattern is gone now. Ellie-Anne and I live only in an elimination game where everyone and everything is terminal. Although somehow Ellie-Anne and I made a connection and that connection changed something forever. Something arranged and rearranged. We created something once seen it can never be unseen. It is a meaning that finds us even if we are blind and do not seek it. It is an eternal organizing pattern of reflected light upon the sea. Ellie-Anne and I found this. I imagine our home is a heart shaped locket. A closed system that protects us from the council. An illuminated encapsulation; the only thing remaining when we're gone. That I think is what love is.

I lay across Ellie-Anne to protect her from the knife. Before the council assassin left he saw a small beam of reflected light in an endless black sand sea of darkness. He scooped the heart shaped glow feeling its weight and the grains of darkness fall between his fingers. He held it before his eyes entirely mystified. What was it and why could he see?