Conditional Reality

You will get bored, but you expect that and will cope by getting lots of sleep and really taking your time with every activity. After a while it won't be such a big deal. What's harder is dealing with the reality of everyone else dying on you. Before long all of humanity will be sparking flickers of light, brightening briefly, than fading before you can even know them. You won't want to make friends, much less love anyone. You will fill the world and the centuries, see it all, but will feel nothing. Thinner than faded dreams, you will hurt.

Labels: Wishes you don't want granted

You learn from birth to death how to navigate this ship through the waters of existence. Your onboard crew, working together like experienced sailors, know only this hull and this delicate rigging. Foreign vessels, however sturdy, are unwieldy attempts to disrupt what you know. Disaster awaits you if you board that odd deck and attempt to tack around those rocks waiting with no lighthouse you can possibly recognize. And don’t talk to us about retraining or reprogramming. If you tried it on the fly you would be done for. We don’t regret this. We accept it with thanks. Even gratitude.

Labels: Wishes you don't want granted

An army of skeletons arrayed around you. Who would not flinch at the sight of such an armada, visible wherever you once saw ordinary people? Mocking grins always there, cages of ribs like prison cells, floating in the air on grotesque pillars cracked at the knees. Then to realize such creatures, made of murky bone and floating in a gelatinous home, merely mimic the one housed inside you. You hold up your hand and see segmented pieces of the horrible thing, like warm worms waiting for the cocoon of your flesh to slip away so they can emerge, living free.

Labels: Wishes you don't want granted

Because life is selfish. Because you would become a resource. Because people do not have a history of caring for natural resources. Because suffering is ubiquitous. Because the line of ill people would stretch to infinity. Because your tendency to want to help would eventually drain you of everything. Because you would die of weariness. Because you cannot save everyone. Because choosing would break your heart. Because eventually people would bring you their sick dogs. Because they would prefer a well pet to a healed relative. Because all that suffering would hurt you. Because the hardest to heal is yourself.

Labels: Wishes you don't want granted

That mountain would look so lovely over there, behind that grove of apple trees. Give me a second, I’ll just move it over to—there! That’s much better. But now that I see it there, maybe it needs to be closer, so we are in the foothills. Hold on, I’ll just—oh! Yes. Beautiful. Hmmm. You know what’s really wrong? The sun. It should be over a little. The angle is just wrong. Give me a sec— There. Isn’t that better? The shadow is so much more—what’s the word? Dramatic. Yes. I love it. Just love it. Don’t you?

Labels: Wishes you don't want granted

First of all, clocks don’t run backwards, memory is not hope, and the future has its own foreign grammar. But forget all that and let’s cut to the chase: do you really want to know when and how you will die? Some knowledge wants to hide behind unbreachable walls. You attack them with sledge hammers. That bounce off. Try to burrow into them like termites, who don’t know much but know enough to spit out what they can’t digest. There is numbing knowledge that only hurts you. Saddens you before your time, blurred by what you should have left unseen.

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Molded by gravity and the curves of the earth, you would open your self to an onslaught of vertigo should you ever sprout wings. You wouldn’t know how to care for your feathers. Air traffic control is not in your nature. Looking up and down would be a matter of life or death. Your little brain, used to the pushing back of the planet, would know only how to spiral endlessly in the air. Where is the solid ground? Why does the wind insist on its own geography and how will you ever find your bearings in the invisible sea?

Labels: Wishes you don't want granted

It was our defensive response, eons ago, to turn it off. And now you want the cascade to tumble through you again? You want to hear the last thoughts of dying animals and the moans of injured trees? You don’t know the scratchy voices of rocks, scraping into our brains, was what made us inhumane creatures in the first place. Snuffing the burden of feeling was our necessary trick of evolution. We shriveled into ourselves to survive and came to this: animals blissfully unaware of the deaths of stars, fizzling into darkness and showering us with splashes of sad rays.

Labels: Wishes you don't want granted