Overlap

Chapter 55: Fade to Black

<07/06/2011 - 15:01 | Link Street (Park), Marietta, GA, USA>

The world around us is a blazing inferno of hell, unmatched by any other terror. I loitered longer, leaning my body against some of the red poles sticking out of the ground in the neighborhood park. Others walked or played nearby me, but I ignored their presence, as they ignored mine. None of this is real anyway. The world here is fake. Even the heat burning my soul is no more real than all these kids playing around.

I could have known somebody else. I could have been somebody else. But I turned out to be me. Whatever I've become, I don't know who I am anymore. I glanced at my arms as if they were mysterious extensions of myself. Who am I? Every time I asked myself the question, my mind flooded every concentrated thought back onto Lumina again. I couldn't understand why that one question made me think so much about her, but every memory I had before meeting Lumina just seemed to fade into oblivion when I reached for them.

Only I noticed that the false world around us became devoid of all color and life. To me, there was no difference between this playful, colorful park of the summer, and a dreadful trench blanketed by ominous darkness in every direction, absent of color, arrested by memory, lingering in the apocalypse. Whether such a place only exists in my broken mind, or whether I am the only real entity that sees the end of all, I linger in this place, a place without time, without hope, without light, and without sound. It is empty, isolated, and lonely, yet it serves as a perfect place to rest, to sleep, to die.

What if I'm the fake? What if I'm the dream of Lumina, instead of the other way around? Or what if I've gone insane and made her up in my mind to keep my sanity from cracking? I tried more to imagine a horrific scenario, but it did me no good. I couldn't imagine being Lumina anyway; as she was such a different person from me, whoever I am.

Lost in the darkness of the post-apocalyptic world, I had no sense of self, no identity, no detail to identify any uniqueness. I have merely become a background, removed from all feeling as this dark and comforting world was. I have these memories of somebody else, somebody named Lumina, yet I know not my own identity, my name eaten by a power otherworldly.

Nobody would ever believe me. I can't prove that she exists. On the other hand, I can't prove that she doesn't exist. It's all pointless. Talking to people is pointless. Trying to fit in with life is meaningless. I am human, yet I am not human. I don't know who I am anymore. I kept myself barely hydrated as the sun's rays beat down on me, still so radiating, yet so grey and dull. Despite the usual brightness and flare, the entire world around me seemed darker and grey-blue, as if I were looking through a faint color filter.

Having you here with me is the only thing that makes sense. But the world says no. My own desire to have Lumina here with me somehow reflected back into myself, amplified six times by the negative variables pushing against my only wish; the heat, the brightness, the blazing scent, the summer, the world, God! When I tried to glance forward in time, forward to the next winter realizing how many more months away it was from now, I realized that I've only been apart from her for one month out of the expected five remaining, a realization that made me laugh out loud maniacally.

Even all time escapes this mysterious unison of the unknown, locking all senses away from the body, and emanating the constructs of a unique self-generated hell, binding me beyond.

Five months? Five years? What's the difference? I continued laughing uncontrollably, my legs sinking from the pain flooding inside, trying to fill an impossible void in my heart. "I'm never going to see her again. How silly of me to think any of that Altiri stuff was ever real." The phrasing I added to my perspective highlighted the first point so strongly, it melted some of the confusion I made, between laughing and crying. I rested my face into my hands again, letting all my true feelings show, crying like a baby.