It is different things for different people. And it’s so vague that you really know what or how someone else experiences it. With time, it may alter. It matures. It evolves. It can become cynical. But never cyclical. It does not repeat itself. For each person, it has a unique signature, a rocky fingerprint, an alluring scent. It can be an avalanche. For each person, it’s one avalanche throughout their life. Snow rolling down from the tip of an upset mountain, sometimes it will snag and fizzle out. Other times, it will snowball into something bigger and powerful, more magnificent than the clump of frozen water that it came from. With the first, it was excitement. With the second, comfort. The third was falling into the snowball. Immersing yourself fully in it. Enjoying the ride. The fourth. A cleanse from the black snow that had swirled inside. That was drowning, suffocating, poisoning. And then there’s hope. Maybe there’s more. Maybe there’s one that isn’t an impediment. As it rolls down the hill while the sun glows on the horizon, warming the mountain with its groggy tendrils of light, the snowball helps you become stronger, firmer, wiser. Happier.

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He sat in the car and wept. Shadows circled around the car. The night was drawing nearer. It was getting chilly. As he cried, he lost body temperature. As he sobbed, he lost feeling and sensation. At the same time, he could feel a tingling crawling up his spine. He wondered. What would have happened if he hadn’t been in this situation. He wondered. What would have happened had the boy not been in his. A knock on his window. A man with an unfriendly sneer motioning for him to roll the window down. He shook his head. The man motioned again. He turned the key in the engine, rolled down the window just a few centimeters. “Do you have a lighter?” He shook his head. The man pondered for a little while. His face was speckled. His teeth were yellow. The sneer was wide and a little dangerous looking. The man motioned again. He said, “no”. He wasn’t going to roll the window down. Did this man not know who he was? You stop seeing all of them personally and they forget. The gun was in the dashboard. He looked over, and then looked at him, and gave up on the idea. Who cared? This foot soldier wasn’t worth it.

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Four minutes and forty seconds. That’s all it took. It felt like a lifetime, and it felt like mere seconds. Four minutes and forty seconds.

It began when the sounds of silence and death were punctured by his scream. A scream that echoed the ache in his heart. An ache even he didn’t understand at that point.

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Splashes of white and black moving around like a series of Rorschach images. He was in this world. Without color. Just black and white. All the sensations were slowly fading away, sounds from the forest: the cackling fire, the rajah, the echoes of his scream, all of those things fading away, replaced by a slow monotonous throb in his head. The smells of the fumes, the trees, the wet mud, all fading away, replaced by a fresh smell that felt almost artificial. The taste of the air, earthy, olive-y, pine, oak, a distant memory now. He could see his body, that much was a relief. But it felt like he was light, as if his body were a chalice. Almost weightless, yet with weight. Just not the one he had felt before. The white was endless, if those were walls or just extensions in this place, dragging on and on and on, into the nether, he could not tell. Here, nothing mattered. He could see how all his worries, his emotion, his love, nothing had really ever mattered. In the end, there was nothingness, what you left behind was well, a vessel that was empty of anything else.

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He had had a dream, Hur did.

His eyes would open, early in the morning, he would leap out of bed at a speed that belied his age. He would kiss his sleeping wife on the forehead, hold, and squeeze her hands, and then walk over to her room. He would sit on a chair by her bed, staring at her with love, and at this point, always, his heart swelled up with love. He was stare at her, she would yawn and turn over and slowly, invariably, at some point, her eyes would open. She would smile her tiny smile at him, eyes still drowsy and ask him what he was doing here. He would say he just wanted to spend time with her, heart hanging on to every word of hers. “I love you so much,” he would say, as he’d hug her tight, and then tickle her armpits and she’d giggle. “Do you love mommy?” “So much, so very much.” “Like me?” “I love you different, and I love mommy different. You’re my daughter and there’s nothing more I want in the world. I want to be here for you always. I want to and will do my best to protect you when the world tries to hurt you. I’ll always be here for you.” Here, he’d get a little sad, because how do you explain to your child, who looks up to you, that you will die before they do, and then you won’t be there for them. But then she would smile, a beautiful, full, unworried smile, the kind only children can have, and heart would drown in love.

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Later, he would wonder what it had been. Had he somehow betrayed the trust she had had in him. Has he felt something else. Somewhere else. For someone else. He wouldn’t find out till much later, months after he began to wonder. It just wasn’t right. Her situation, and his situation, they had felt so right. So together. But such is the beauty of these creatures. There are so many broken puzzle pieces walking around, waiting for their better halves, that if they find someone who’s even remotely better than they expected, and that’s another problem, they have such low expectations, someone who’s even remotely better than their expectations, they think it’s the one. He did too. Because who else would understand him, and his world. There was attraction, there was chemistry. She was the one. She fit his broken pieces better than he could ever have imagined. Hur thought he was in love. He was also in love. Love is a matter of perspective. Up till that point, love for him had been astounding, beautiful. Love had been in Acqlimia. And then it would all go burning down. Has he made a mistake. Maybe. Wait, maybe it was letting him in his head. He had let the shadow rajah in the the shadow rajah had begun to wreak havoc.

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I stopped for a while. It was nice. I was able to write more about my story. But you know what the problem was? Since I wasn’t venting it out here, I began to talk back to you more. I need an outlet. And I really don’t care what you think - sadly, I do. Otherwise we wouldn’t have this problem. But I need an outlet. This is the lesser of two evils. And it brings me more satisfaction. Fuck you. Why do I have to call this an evil? It’s not. It’s a necessary good. It helps me get this out. And that, more than anything, is what I need. And since you have the emotional capacity of a signpost,

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The forest was on fire. His heart was thumping. Hur was not afraid of death. Maybe as some human instinct programmed into him for survival. But until recently, he had welcomed it. Maybe not exactly that, but to some degree, he hadn’t minded it. He was afraid of his death. He was afraid of hers. The night was dark. His watch told a different story. It was six in the morning. It should have been light an hour and a half ago. They were trudging through the forest, trying to find the way out. She was ahead of him, her arms bruised and bloody. It seemed as if the branches and twigs of the forest were trying to scratch her, were going out of their way to scratch her.

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Safe. That was the word of the day. Ever since he’d landed in this country, and to some extent before that, all the way up to when he’d been clobbered and picked up in the forest where he’d first seen her, he had felt hunted. Even before that, if he was being true to himself. Possibly even before that. Hunted. That’s what he’d felt. In her arms, he felt safe. No more of those dreams of falling. Waking up, legs feeling shaky, body disoriented, heart racing, nostrils smelling the perfumed scent of danger. In her arms, he felt safe.

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Giddy. Like a schoolgirl. They were holding hands as they walked the grounds of the building. The sky was filling up with darkness. He was smiling. His heart was content. Finally. No more cliches. No more pithy quotes. No more worries. It just was. It’s hard to explain that feeling in words. None can describe it. You can explain anger or joy or envy or laughter.

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“And that’s all I know.” As he finished telling his story, which took far longer than it should have, because he was too distracted looking into her eyes, he realized that there was now a huge burden off his chest. A feeling of weightlessness. Having been able to share parts of it with someone, especially her, had really helped unburden him some. And he hadn’t told her all he knew. He felt guilty about that small lie. But he wasn’t sure if she could handle it.

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She got to him first. He opened his eyes, felt a growl in his stomach. He didn’t remember the last time he had had food. She got to him first and when she stepped foot into the compound, he could feel it all the way in the basement. He heard a gasp as if she were right next to him. His heart started pounding. He didn’t understand what was going on, and yet he fully understood. Life was a contradiction. At least, his had always been. Who else has felt it? He knew at least the other had. And there was his roar. A mighty roar that shook the continent. And yet, the blind dismissed it: the sheep shook their heads and soon forgot all about it.

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The three were standing still. Two men, one woman. Still in their suits. Spotless, or they would have been but for the crimson. Slowly leaking. As if time were slowed down. Then time seemed to return to normal speed, and one by one, they toppled over. The air was stale. The only sound after the thud was the blood, now spitting out from the gashes in each of their throats. They had fallen forward, so you couldn’t see the shock in the eyes of one, and the blankness, a fate worse than death in the eyes of another, and thankfulness in the eyes of the third. This last had been cutting himself all the way home. Trying to gain control of a life and universe that had seemed to veer and careen wildly out of proportion. In a way, they would have been glad to have it ended. To not know anymore. Had they known that it would be ending. But the blade was swift, and in one slicing motion, slit all of their wrists.

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The landing had been broadcast to every television and every electronic device that could view it on the planet. It was a separate matter that not as many were watching it as had been the first one, almost half a century ago. They had landed on the moon. A mission without any hiccups. Not as many people cared anymore. It was just another step in the colonization of space. People only cared about the first astronaut. Do you know who the second man was? Do you know the names of any of the people that went with or helped Armstrong put his now-heroic first foot on the moon? First Foot. First foot. No you don’t. No one does. No one cares. Of course, if you put it in an environment where people can entertain themselves with the excuse of being educated, then people will leap at the thinly veiled veneer of falsehoods to ‘learn’. They’re not learning, in case the two sentences that precluded this one, you know, the ones heavily laden with sarcasm, dripping with oodles and oodles of it, in case those sentences weren’t clue enough. A surprisingly large number of the people that did watch it were glued to screens where the app they were using was not a video conferencing app or anything of that nature.

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He was shaking. Uncontrollably. His body was on fire. A thousand pinpricks of fire, burning needles pushing through his skin like it was wax, and it was melting. His core was cold. It felt like he was dying. The pain was all consuming, all empowering. The pain was divine. It was everywhere and nowhere. It could not be seen, and yet in his head, at this moment, it was all there was. The cavern was dark. His screen was lit by a blue glow. He was sitting by it, leaning against the wall, mouth open in a soundless scream. His chair was spinning slowly, uncaringly, nearby. The sound of the wheels of the chair on the rock floor, and patter of water as it fell down from above. Drip. Drip. Just one spot. His head was burning. And though he was silent, if you were looking at him, you could tell something was wrong.

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It was dark. The light that the submarine shone, headlights shooting out a powerful beam of light, that was consumed by the darkness. Surrounded by it. It might cut through the darkness, but in this place, it did not go very far. The two humans inside the machine were grinning, ear to ear. They had made it. They had gone deeper than any human ever had. Deeper into the depths of the ocean. The inside of the submersible smelled of sweat and human body odors. The humming of the machine was the only sound, inside and outside. Their ears were throbbing from the pressure and depth they had exposed their bodies to. One of them had his fingers around the control, calm, steady. The other reached for the glass on the dashboard. As if to teach and feel beyond it. A fish floated past it.

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Cain looked at the house. He was standing by the door. The wind was cool. The birds were chirping. The sun was nowhere in his vision. But it was out there, had been as of forty five minutes ago. The sky was a light blue, with the hints of the red sun and some white for clouds. The house looked spectacular. It stood out from the rest on this street. But he had expected that of her. He had always expected that of her. He sat down cross legged across the street from the house and looked through the two windows on the second floor. Both were shuttered by curtains.

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He woke up to see them one bending over him, the other moving from one spot to another, moving, because she didn’t know what to do. In seconds, he realized what must have happened. The answer came to him easily. Because he remembered saying he only ran a little more, and he didn’t remember how he got from that to the floor. There was a throbbing in his head. His traps hurt. Electrolytes. Give him some electrolytes. She intercommed downstairs and asked the boy to bring some up. She closed the door firmly. He asked him if he wanted a pillow. He said no, thank you. He was fine. The man gave him a pillow anyways. He placed his head under it.

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He winced. Gasping in long breaths of air. Focusing on something else helped with the pain. But he couldn’t continuously keep sucking in air. When he let it out, the pain rushed back in. He winced, tears forming in the corners of his eyes. Then he thought of people who suffered from far worse, broken arms, burns, death. And no more years came out.

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She wrote and she wrote. They sat and watched. Other than the scratching of quill on paper, there was absolute silence. Stars twinkled in the galaxy. They could now see through the room, or were those the walls of the room that were made to look like the outside. Did it matter? Not really. Didn’t matter to either of them. They were both occupied with other things. It might have mattered to her. They were both looking at her, as tears, sparkling like the stars, fell from her eyes. They were confused. Both of them knew what tears were. But they thought all three of them did not have the capacity for such emotion. Apparently they were wrong. Apparently she did. Unless this was something new.

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