The Mindless Man's Paradise

Chapter two

  I woke up to sunlight.

  Upon walking outside and looking up, it seemed to be noon, for the sun was directly above my head.

  It was much warmer in the day time, but not enough to melt the snow.

  I returned back into the tent where I sat with my legs crossed and ate the leftovers from the previous night. Delicious wasn’t the word for it. Especially when it was cold and strange-tasting, but it was mostly the fact that I was eating a drumstick for breakfast that made it unappetizing. Usually, I would eat cereal in the mornings along with some sort of fruit and milk. Anything sweet, really.

  After painstakingly swallowing the meat, I packed my gear and readied up for the day ahead.

  Everything was packed away but then it came to the final thing; the tent. After spending all of my time finding out how to open it, I realized I didn’t have any idea of how to close it.

  I wrestled with the tent for twenty minutes until I had wrangled it into a slightly deformed version of its previous shape.

  Triumphantly, I stuffed the cube-ish looking thing back into my pack and took a moment to regain my composure before setting off in the direction from the night before.

  I hesitated, but when the necklace started to get warmer again, I walked with a little more confidence.

  I began walking, and already it hadn’t even been twenty-four hours, yet I was feeling the loneliness set in like it was an illness.

  Me, myself and I. That’s all there was, here. I talked with myself a lot, reasoning about things that didn’t need to be reasoned about. I found myself questioning things that I had never questioned before, and remembering things I had always shied away.

  When I was eleven, I had asked Mother a question.

  I walked home from school having just learnt of the history of our nation.

  We formed from the ashes, almost like a phoenix, after a deadly world war. The Land was the safest part of the world. Radioactive fallout created a problematic obstacle for living conditions, and The Land seemed to be the only place without it.

  Naturally, the rest of Earth’s population flocked from all corners of the planet just to be there.

  There were ten or so people that decided to gather. They made rules; laws, and then they called themselves HQ. Headquarters. They formulated what created war, and how to prevent it, fearful of repeating the past.

  This included the necessary scrapping of names, ethnicities, culture, and cities.

  The small population of The Land happily obliged, believing it would avoid any further conflict.

  To me, the most fascinating topic of the subject was the fact that people had something called names. A device that people used to identify themselves. Something used to distinguish people from each other. A strange mixture of words that could sound beautiful, strong, or delicate. Sometimes, they had hidden meanings, and sometimes they related back to ancient cultures and history.

  And back then, people found their own loves. People went on ‘dates’ and got ‘married’.  The whole concept was extremely fascinating. I found myself becoming more and more enthralled by my ancestors’ ways that I wrote stories, poems, drawings, and other dangerous creations just fantasizing about them. Things of which would be highly frowned upon if discovered.

  Then came the fateful day that Mother found them. Hidden carelessly under my pillow, it wasn’t difficult at all. She berated me for hours upon hours.