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[01 May 2004|01:33pm] |
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mood |
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 apathetic |
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A few weeks ago, before meetin Xiang, I was shifting through the left overs of lives, or the dropped remnents of posessions, in an apartment building near the Metropolitan. You never knew what you could find; maybe I thought I'd find someone by rummaging through places I already knew were empty. There was a sharp smell from inside one room; it was a death smell, a corpse smell, and I knew I'd find something dead when I walked in. You know that kind of smell; rot and amonia, sharp and chocking. Reaching inside your nose to make you rebel against every attempt at breathing.
But I went in anyway, not like I'd not seen the results that went with such a smell, and found a child. Wrapped up in blankets, had to have been only a year old at best by the size of the rotting corpse, it was decomposing in the middle of pale blues and soft creams. A birth certificate hung crooked on the wall. Nested in ragged blankets, the black and brown body was empty--a cavity of the chest, the eyes, the nose, where insects had burrowed and eaten. Had to be months old, but you could tell it had died from starvation--there was a thinness of the limbs that didn't come with just rot. A blot of death in such calming colours; it disgusted me, I think.
I don't know why, but I managed to wrap the child up in more of it's piece meal blankets and bury it. If it had been just another man or woman, I would not have cared. But it had been a child, and I suppose that had made a difference to me. I don't want to remember how the body felt when I picked it up, nor the smell, nor the long hour I spent with a broken pole jabbing it into the dirt just inside the outer edge of central park. It's all hazy, thinking back on it, a numb kind of protection for what I'd done.
Maybe that's why I went back to Central Park later, and met Xiang. Strange, how creey it is to imagine those small, deleicate rit driven hands a good few feet underground consideing who I am and what I've done. Less creepy, and more of a depressed kind of sadness.
I'm getting hungrier and hungrier. We must find others soon, Xiang and I. This can't do at all.
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| Clinging to bits of the Past |
[29 Apr 2004|08:12pm] |
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mood |
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 calm |
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I've never really understood before in my life what the word empty meant. What an empty world would be like. Memories echo of a world where the human race was but a mud sploch on a page, but even there, there was this sense of growing and being...
I can't believe that humanity will allow itself to be wiped out. Maybe that's what draws me to the musuem. It's proof of how long humanity has existed. Years and years of art and imagination, condensed into a few massive floors. Spanning countries and ages. Touching the stone of a temple transferred from Egypt convinces me of something old and unwavering. A sense of existence that comes from knowing history.
I've known that they were out there, but I didn't feel the need to find them until now. Maybe I've been in shock, and I'll never admit it to anywhere else (because I know me too well) but I suppose even the best of us would be caught up in what's happened so quickly. Or maybe it's apathy, pure and simple. I've been content to sit in the remnants of pasts I can just touch, to remember, to loose myself in that cycle of wlaking through exhibit and exhibit like a ghost.
Now I've run into one of them, but he's much more then I could have ever hoped for. Green. That's the word for it, green. I like him, instantly, despite myself. I don't like people. Generally. I'd run into one or two interesting ones, but it was always there. But now, they are just as strange, and there's no need to wear sunglasses anymore. And maybe that's the biggest shift.
I must say, I'm feeling purpose again. Just a bit of it, but it's him I have to thank. This Xiang. I like him. Depsite myself. Maybe it's because he is so green feeling. I can taste the plant in him, but I can taste the animal too, and that's the most interesting part.
Interesting. I can smile and breathe that word again. Interesting.
I can't wait to see who we can find. I wonder who it is, indeed, that has survived. I know they are there... but will if be worth finding?
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| Xaeden Grey, "Waiting for...what? |
[28 Apr 2004|10:02pm] |
Xaeden Grey wasn't sure whether this turn of events made him happy or not. He stood on the stone staircase that lead up to what had been the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the great wonders of intellectual New York. That wasn't true anymore; displays had been sacked, ruined; priceless objects turned to dust because everyone had paniced. His mind dwelled on it even as the wind sped through streets that echoed with the pure emptiness of them, catching in strands of violet to pull them across his face. It was easy now to pick his way through the pieces of glass, the dust of smashed cement, the pot holes and the fallen poles and long dead snakes of electric lines that had lng since stopped their electric hiss.
New York was a graveyard, marked by the headstones that rose towards the sky with shattered windows and dead insides. New York was once a living, rbeathing thing--and now it wasn't. It was dead, skeletons. Rotted. Xaeden's hands shoved deeper into his pockets, long strides taking him along the streets. His mind knew the grid, and knew where the grid had been broken by the looting. He'd been circling around the Met, the museums, because they seemed like a bit of sanity.
He was in Central Park soon enough; dangerous enough when electirc lights had drowned the stars, but now even worse and better at the same time. Already the plants had begun to run wild, grabbing back what mankind had kept so careuflly pruned from them. Dirt and trash slowly being eatne by thorns and bushes overrunning their trimmings. The Museums were his, but Central Park felt like something else's now, and he liked it that way. But the itch of being so isolated was beginning to rive him in larger and larger circles, like now, as he carefully picked his way through the plantlife with quiet footfalls. He couldn't keep himself quiet; he had to make noise, just to hear the proof of his existence.
"Strange," he whispered in his low voice to a plant in conversation. He paused by it, a tree reaching tangled limbs towards the sky, and put a hand against the bark. Wasn't talking to inanimate objects a bad sign of lack of human contact. "It's nicer, in Central Park, without the people, don't you think?" Of course, the tree didn't really answer. So he stood there anyway, waiting for... gods knew.
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| Three Months of Quiet |
[28 Apr 2004|09:18pm] |
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mood |
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calm |
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Silence.
It echoes. It vibrates. It's like the air, moving with it. I can't help but love the fact I can stand on the top of a crumbling building, lift my eyes to the horizon, and hear silence. Maybe not totaly silence, because nature even in the face of holocaust does not allow that, but its a lack of all those grinding noises that echoed and swallowed the world only three months ago. The humn of electricity that was constant; the grind of gears. Gone.
All of it. Gone. Gone, are the eternal lights. You can lay on your back, and see each and every star like someone spread glitter across the sky that before could only be touched from a hihg mountain secluded somewhere.
You can sense it. This place is a graveyard, with gigantic tombs and headstones that rise to touch the clouds when you walk around shattered glass that dots the streets. I find myself being being drawn back to the Mteropolitan Museum again and again. Staring at the shattered glass. Wondering how many priceless pieces of history are now dust from the ill care of panic'd hands. How many paintings ruined.
Maybe its the wanton destruction of priceless history that makes me stay around the Museum. I can't wander too far from it. I've made my point to the shifty eyed kids wandering about--that it's things aren't to be touched anymore. So many things, dead and gone, no longer important. Who cares for a piece of art when you need to fight for a peice of bread? Who cares for art, when there is no one to whisper to you why it was painted?
I sit on the steps of the Museum, put my back to the solid stone of it's foundation that may outlive the sudden dive back into the middle ages that's caught up humanity, and close my eyes. I don't really fear the wandering shells of humanity wandering around. I'd hear them. So I tell myself.
Or maybe, right now, I don't really care if they found me unawares...
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[28 Apr 2004|05:44pm] |
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Testing only Testing Only
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