She shivers in the oncoming darkness, and all I can think about is scratching her face. Childhood mishaps flood the nerves barely sustaining my eyes, and the bafflement I've felt since this whole mess started is reinvigorated. Oddly clasped to dark folds in my brain, sleep shakes her up and I am with her in moments unrecognized, and some so familiar that all I perceive is the horror of absolute repetition. What the hell are we doing here, and more importantly, why the hell are we together? I meekly cut the cord ages ago, but still I find her when I awake in new realms. Tonight, on some mysterious journey in our brand new post-apocalyptic world, knowing here that all cities and loved ones could be gone, my main task is keeping my homicidal urges toward my one companion hidden. The last person on Earth I'd want to ride out the end of civilization with.
With her, I find myself in a place I could not possibly have a memory of, and for that matter neither could she. Sky marked by old days curled up and gray, hard rain-slicked road still paved. There must be some reason this fact surprises us. Cradled in mountains we shoulder a great dread that is shapeless to my immediate awareness, which trickles in and out. I want to figure out the mystery of so many things, but the danger looming does not psychologically perplex me more than her presence. But for the sake of appearance, I share in her concerned and furrowed brow and we leave the road. A large manor greets us at the bottom of a grassy hill. Though physically dissimilar, the hill reminds me:
Snow bunnies tumbled in a new front yard. Red and blue, and puffy faces doomed to years of questions like "What type of exercises are you doing?" Our womb-sharing days were numbered. That door next to our haven opened with a surface of greeting, and a cold depth of suffocation that stuck up in our skin, but when we shuddered we mistook it for the weather and sealed our fates. The words of a new friend "This is this and that is that, and I will tell you everything and you will listen." No one guesses their real timeline, not for anything.
Delight strikes our faces when a giant tuna whips the surface of a pristine pool. We feast. Raw tuna can conjure sensations as satisfying as raspberry chocolate truffle cake, but here I do not get a hint of savory delight. We leave our grand place, neither of us ever questioning the mood but thankfully having the tact to pack up the leftovers. Perhaps large buildings are condemned places not to be trusted? Comfort dulls the senses, and our moment of relief is a dangerous distraction from something. But why her? Relying on her is killing me.
With her I have always been lesser, which suited my nature as a sidekick and hers as a mastermind. Hardly super-powered, kindergarten weakness led to adolescent dependence, and it would have been easy for everyone involved, all two of us, to stay exactly the same forever. Two sad little gladiators in a crumbling Coliseum as spectators of varying dispositions observed through an unbreakable barrier. Hecklers descended, as did soothsayers and apathetics, but no one was louder in our own ears than each other. Bound tight enough to finish sentences, we sometimes discarded the use of such things altogether. Better if no one could listen. That feeling of entwinement, too sickly for lovers but too thick for simple school chums, still makes me cringe.
All of these thoughts toil within the sub-mind of me as a new world stands silent before us. I am thankful I can no longer read her thoughts, or care to. Soon hunger returns, and the remains of our mystery tuna is consumed in haste. We tread on with strange hopes for a city. The pain of fatigue evades us, and I am certain there is smog through the trees below. Why does it surprise us that there are still cities? All not destroyed in the unknown, perhaps this is a new construction and all the ways of mankind are not wholly snuffed out.
Pounding the road with worn out shoes and even wearier feet, time propels us so fast not an image of our journey registers. The familiar bustle of contained life. No one gives us a second look. I assume we do not appear much more bedraggled than they. We feast. Eating is on my mind as much in dreams as it is in the daytime. We marvel at our purchase of a travel cooking kit for a mere $2.49. Though I anticipated relief in the discovery of retained systematic living, we are apparently not interested. There is no discussion. The city fades, and we are in a car with four strangers. At least the future still has transportation.
We pass our old camp. Time hovers about a lone wolf, oddly separate from all things, consuming scraps. I am certain that if I touched his fluffed midnight fur it would be so soft I'd be rendered useless. He is the clearest thing I have seen, and he sucks in all the light. I look at her to see if she has noticed. No one else seems to. Our eyes meet a moment and I hope I don't grimace. She trusts me, and we are both beginning to wonder about our new travel companions. The idea of traveling to a destination in a vehicle instead of on our tired feet seems to have seduced to a point of nonchalance that I now find intolerable. With each growing second I notice the wild nature in their eight tired eyes deepen.
We have simply abandoned the vehicle. Hours later it seems a glorious lost refuge compared to this makeshift raft. Without any conversation, I knew we had to appease these people with a new plan of travel. I recall no arguments on the logic of leaving behind our more sensible transportation, or why we could not go our separate ways. Thankfully I am with her, and her alone on the raft, our four friends racing up behind us. I feel like a poor wretch at the end of Aguirre, but instead of cute jungle monkeys to trail me I hear the deep rumble of bears in the distance. This is not the animal I'd choose to encounter unarmed and half clothed on a raft bound haplessly together by what I fear used to be our pants.
I see the woods around us. I take in the beauty of it and for a moment I am able to look down upon myself, shivering and clinging to wooden logs as she begins to weaken and slip off beside me. The trees are the way Malick would shoot them, towering majesty and emerald green. We speed past rocky bends, the fear of drowning and the approach of bears on all of our faces. I come back to myself in time to watch brown fur emerge and swim straight across our path. I hear them all. And they see us. Our raft breaks apart.
She and I, we go under. Our nameless companions scramble to land with no inquiries of our fate. I alone pull her out, breathless and confused by my efforts. They watch us. They're watching to see if I lose her. I stay away from them, but we are all heading in the same direction. We stumble, for the moment safe, toward a small cliff-side hanging over a hill. Within the ground is an entrance, a hallow chamber leading to an entire manor. A brick manor. There are murmurs of glee, but all I hear are the echoes of catacombs. With her I left behind a structure such as this above ground. Nothing particularly haunting about it except its emptiness:
Her mother smoked inside with all the windows closed, and it stuck in the air along with the scent of apple juice. For years afterward I couldn't drink it. Their house looked like ours from the outside, the bedrooms were all in the same place. But they had a basement. It was at times a sanctuary, a laboratory of discovery, but it was still behind enemy lines and all the allure that pulled me down there most certainly turned to shit. We stuck well because we appeared the same, but then we could never make new friends that got along.
This new place presents its uncertainty with a more sinister facade. Something more obvious, something I can pick up on sooner. I breathe deep, still half naked and actually beginning to feel the cold of the water in my skin. She and I, we dread something. Not the bears. Though those creatures come. I know the dread is simply my own. I follow her and the four into the ground with more fear for what is below than without, hoping that I won't be fooled by words into believing it to be a sanctuary. Falling for the same trick more than once renders anger useless. I leave the blame with her.
