Shore

The air tastes sour, it leaves a residue on my insides, a foul soup, not the primordial sort, but rather, loosely the non-indigenous sort, from some other place.

The wind, the heat, and omnipresent anger from the inland sea only feeding my frustration.

We; humans, get like this when we’re alone. I know I am simply no better than the raving types, only I do it to myself quietly. I do it here, pen to paper, alone. And I believe I am sane.

Nothing is what we thought it would be, we imagined that we would be dragged out of our homes, that the outside world would always remain possible, that somehow we would be making journeys. But the apocalypse isn’t the road, it isn’t out there, the worst of the apocalypse is internal, it’s at home stranded on these islands, in this mind.

Home is the new archipelago that resembles a reef at low tide, where the houses appear as barnacles, clinging on and supporting life, as pathetic as it is, we have become hermit crabs moving to a better shell at every opportunity.

The sun changed, the water came, it came from everywhere, under, over, and upon. Roads turned to rivers, dark indigo at first, then earthing to raw umber, and finally greening to a hideous iridescence, resembling a ghastly painting mistake.

Systems made for dry earth quickly failed us, and foul effluence rose, mixed, and fouled more. There is no clean anything, no power, no connection.

All that is left is fortitude. fortitude to not go mad.

I’m leaving here today, this will be my last offering, if there is a future, maybe in some small way my sanity is my gift.

My mind is all I have, I want to keep it, so I have to go.

I’ve made a makeshift kit of diving and ski clothing, strange bedfellows but it also makes sense.

The water has been deadly for years. Toxic molecules hold every living thing to ransom, alluring from the surface, underneath lies only treacherous slime filled with a deadly bacterium.

‘They built up numbers deftly, adapted, mutated, and with ruthlessness efficiency, this abhorrent act of nature began to eliminate and consume other living things.

Humans never paid mind to the communication structures of the single-cell life form.

Once they got to a certain mass they began to ‘ping’ to calculate their own strength in numbers by sending small amounts of electrical current to ascertain their proliferation. When the returning pings were at numbers to guarantee success, they would replicate at an exponential rate and attack the host. One bacterium could turn into a million, in as little as 12 hours

We had lost the war.

But here I am alive, and I have a crossing to make, and for that, I’ve rigged up a Malibu with an outrigger, a jib, and a dolly. I have everything I need to last me for two weeks, hopefully, I will find other souls and ways to sustain myself, otherwise, I am done.

I’m heading downwind, which will take me due south away from the equator.

I have no one to leave, only people to miss, “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength”. So said the great Marcus Aurelian.

Yes, it is true, my thoughts are my own to master, they will be good and bad but as long as I have thoughts, I am at least living.

I have changed much, I’m not sure why I deserve to survive. There are better people than me, cold in the ground, or turned to ash. I can't help but think that I must have a purpose.

I was never very lucky with life, it was always a struggle. I tended to chose badly, I was average at best, there is absolutely nothing special about me, I am plain and flawed.

When it first happened we were confined to districts, then home, then indoors.

Nature was ruthless, the speed of the breakdown exceeded any semblance of expectation.

Cities emptied, bodies pilled up. We had to dispose of them in fires, rivers, and the fetid ocean.

The same ocean is now feeding the sky with poison under the expanding sun.

The planet is wet, covered by cloud, the cloud is foul; it boils, it steams.

Fungus grows, lesions appear, infections kill.

The sun began its journey toward becoming a red giant fifteen years ago, slowly surely. The physicists were wrong, our solar system was older, a lot older. By what measure, it is not understood.

My mind loops to fill the void, but I am looking for food of course, always food, and clean water.

I’ll go from house to house, like those before me, it’ll most likely take the day to get through the murk, I’ll overnight in some stink hole. The next day I’ll traverse a kilometer of sludge before I get to a river road ( water that flows ).

I’m a pink-skinned person covered in lesions and scabs. My ears have scabs, my arse has scabs, my lips have scabs, generally, I am grotesque, as are all pink people. My epidermis has started to fail. I cannot afford to risk contamination.

The shore is not too ugly. Nature has a way of decorating whilst reclaiming. Long grasses blow in the wind, insects, and birds are around, seemingly not too bothered, only time will tell. Being here is no less joyful than a Sunday picnic, I immediately think of my trail mix of insects.

The surface of the swamp looks like a sick creek, There’s a truck and a power tower I use as navigation, it's the safest route. I’ll harness the wind and hopefully make it to the tree on the little island, no one has burnt it yet, which makes me happy.

The outrigger is heavy, I have some strength, thanks to the meat (dear dog) Mawson taught me how to and what not to. The poor good man went mad, he became a shadow, a ghost you would find standing behind you. He had to endure a second winter on the south pole and it did him in.

I wonder what he would think of all this.

He might laugh at the idea that Antarctica is a destination now.

I’m on my way, the wind is good, not too strong or gaseous. I have a shallow draft, and I drift, the refraction of the foul cloud is beautiful, a spectrum of psychedelic poison. A relief from the dipterous infested greenness.

Still, there is that bulging sun beyond those clouds, raging dying, a constant source of grief.

I wonder at the idea of space exploration, eternally searching for proof and meaning, alas we never realized proof, I suppose that is debatable, but as for meaning, never.

No matter, the legacy is set. We believe in singularity, that gravity is the nuanced powerhouse of the universe, that quantum mechanics is equal in an opposite direction to relativity. Thus we explore the extreme reaches in both directions, on every scale. Humans were able to calculate, visualize, record, and measure the far reaches of space, but we were not able to colonize Mars. We couldn’t live in low gravity. Our last-ditch attempt to defy physics by procreating in space also ended terribly.

We only ever achieved dreadful sadness and were left with the moral dilemma of how to dispose of the contents of certain test tubes. But none of that matters now.

So as brilliant as we are, we can't find a solution to our own biology, and or an answer to our war with a primitive organism.

There is no glory in extinction. Other intelligent life may one day see an imprint of us hovering on the event horizon of a black hole until finally, we disappear.

At least we defied the odds of life on a planet, there is no explanation on a beginning point, there is no such thing as a before time, time, and it's all arbitrary after that.

One could argue that the language of physics is as far-fetched and strange as creationist theory.

Right now I would be glad to have any conversation just to hear the sound of another voice rather than the constant chatter in my own head. I am very lonely, and loneliness is agony.

I have to get somewhere, anywhere.

I expect to find a poster, sometime soon, with some information, traveled ( like Chinese whispers ) nailed to a tree. It will most likely read something like,

“ Estimates put population figures at 1.5 billion humans left. All peoples are migrating toward the poles.”

At least that's what the last poster said, news travels slowly in this world.

Disappointingly the last person I met was a bag person (one who roams with bags) with scabs the size of dinner plates. That human was not pretty, analogously the mind was squirming. As expected there was a rant. His was around the need to wear eye protection, he had the right idea, but had all of his facts wrong; that the lens of the eye will crack open, and that this can only happen over a long period of direct exposure, and so, he had designed a steam-powered hat-making machine…

Of all the people to meet, an obscure fixated one.

Most people are too broken to bother with violence, but if you find one, you run.

There are no gangs of cannibals or packs of dogs or organized raids.

Weak-mindedness became the criminals undoing, truth is the somewhat decent out survived the lowlifes’

All of this reminds me that we are essentially good and with so many regrets there may as well be none. And here I am still in hope, traveling towards an idea, thinking of something better. Then I get the song worm, the one I have every morning, it has become annoying. I pick at its meaning.

“the girl with the heart-shaped locket rolls her lies, as distant shores catch distant skies, the plains of our souls work their way to sleep, with a final and glorious harvest to reap…”

I never get past that bit, it just goes around and around.

I suppose the trope is the journey.

And while the insects have thrived, and the birds live, as do I, one wonders whether there will be a poetic conclusion, or is it all simply science, and maybe our journey is to accept that our life cycle is as it is, we lived, we procreated, we died.

Is that acceptable to our imaginations, to our spirit?

It is possible that the universe, the gods, and all the physics were temporary, and it was after all, always silly and arrogant. If a chook had invented god it would look like a chook, and the universe might look like a sunny field of wheat.

Humans have invented answers to nearly everything, in their own image, and it's not so enduring in the greater picture.

So comes the end to a beautiful and tragic story, It may be told if our primitive little voyager is one day discovered in interstellar space and one day that gold record (with Chuck Berry singing Johnny be good) will somehow, but improbably be translated by an alien life form.

Maybe here begins the seeding of a new planet, maybe its a cycle, to be played over and over again, as with the universe in a universe, with its stars and black holes exploding, imploding, going forward and backward in time, maybe the heart-shaped locket contains an existential truth, there is no plan.

I’ve reached the far shore, I’m heading out on the road river, and will eventually, if luck favors me, get to the inland sea and down to the pole.

I pin my diary on this tree, one life, one small imprint.