I’ve come to learn that I’m not the only traveler here. There are others, creating worlds and then abandoning them, like single serving coffee creamers spent and discarded along the synaptic highways of our imagination. They’ve been here the whole time, but it’s only now that I’ve begun to notice them. The white tiger. The masked children. The elevator attendant. I suppose I thought of them as figments rather than players. Non sequiturs of my own creation, like the projections of people from your life in your dreams. But I’m not dreaming. Although these places share something of that landscape, they are independent of one another. How Mein Kampf and the Bible are both books.
The idea of a populace independent of myself nestled into my left hemisphere this morning. I sat on a ridge overlooking the crater and watched a silver being walk across the horizon. They were too far to shout, so I sat there silently, my eyes trained on their route like a sniper’s scope on a soon to be extinguished dictator. Perhaps it was my loneliness that triggered the epiphany. I haven’t seen anyone, anything, in… it’s hard to say how long. Time doesn’t quite exist in a measurable way here. But I haven’t had social contact in a long enough time that my heart began to beat itself ragged with the idea of our meeting. I scrambled down the side of the ridge, the red dust coating my hands and invading the pores of my clothing, darkening their coat of rouge. But as sweat began to break along the line of my scalp, rivuletting the dust into what looked like ancient symbols on my forehead, I realized the futility of it. That I would never achieve the friction necessary to match their pace. That any vocal waves emitted from my throat would be swallowed up by the void around me, sucked from my mouth and replaced with the grit already accumulated in every other crease and cavity.
I crumpled into the earth, letting gravity finally have its way with me. I frowned. Threw fistfuls of the dust, not caring that it blew back at me. And then I cried, washing my dirt streaked face with rivers of mud. I squeezed my eyes tight against the invading stings. Squeezed until I saw stars. And then oblivion.
I imagined the world I wanted. I thought of the happiest places from my childhood, stuffed deep into the recesses of memory, like your favorite t-shirt stuck to the bottom of the hamper. I threw them haphazardly into being, the landscape around me shifting like an insomniac channel surfing at three am. But it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter how bright and full of people the memories were. How many birthday candles illuminated my cheeks in their rosy hue. When their borders snapped into existence, the colors were mute, mere shades off a grayscale. There was no way to transplant their happiness here. When I was finished, dirty and exhausted, I let them fall away like the confetti they were, letting the red of the desert come back. The sun had gone but the dust still held onto its warmth like the lingering hug of saying goodbye. I walked back to my camp by the pit. To huddle by the crimson hole that lead through a man’s chest and finally into hell. Tomorrow I would leave this place. This purgatory. I sat down, dangling my feet off into the abyss and stared at the flames, until they too faded into sleep, like the last dying embers of a cold winter fire.
