Barren

There are two definitions of the word barren. In relation to land, describing a place as barren would suggest that the land was too poor to produce much or any vegetation. But people can be barren, too. Showing no results or achievements; unproductive.

And so we are the same, this land and I. I feel a kinship with the ground beneath my feet. It is barren, incapable of fulfilling that which it is designed to do: support life. Maybe I am being a little unfair. The ground beneath my feet is supporting life – it is supporting me. And though I may not feel it, I am in fact alive.

Here, I am all that there is. For as far as is visible to me, there is nothing. But wait, that is not quite true either. There is no such thing as nothing, for it in itself is something. Allow me to be more specific:

There is the sky. Always the sky. It is an angry purple-grey, a bruise blooming on the surface of the world like a poisonous flower. And the sun. I am filled with a desperate, aching kind of sadness when I think of Mother Sol and what has become of her. She is obscured now by violent grey matter, too dense to be called clouds any longer, pregnant and swollen with the pollutants that destroyed the world as I knew it and turned it into this. Barren.

And me? I am barren too. I am devoid of everything that once filled me. I have nothing left to show for who I once was or how things once were. But perhaps the scariest part of it all is that my memory is fading, too. It is hard for me to remember that there was ever anything other than this. Other than Barren.

I start to walk. I can walk, I think. When there is an absence of things, it is difficult to know if you are truly moving or if in fact it is all in your mind. And in perpetual semi-darkness, without even Sol to guide me, I never quite know where I am, or how I came to be there.

It is hard, living in the grey. The world used to be so black and white. There was day and then there was surely night. The certainty that one came after the other was ignored, taken for granted. There were differences, too. Different people and different places, different tastes and scents and sounds, different weather and different rules. Now, there is just the same. The same and The Three.

I do not know exactly when The Three came into existence. My eyes see nothing but Barren, and after a time I cannot measure, this begins to play tricks on the mind. Time and consciousness are twisted, my cognitive processes warped so that it is hard for me to distinguish between this and that and the other, between here and there and yonder, between Before It and After It. But The Three, and The Barren, that is all there is now.

I hate The Three. I hate them, but I rely on them as surely as I rely on Mother Sol, suffocated though she is, and the sky and the land. Without The Three, there would just be the sky and Sol and the Barren, and without them, there would be nothing. One day they will be gone. I know this as inevitably as I know I am to take another step. Where will they go? I have no answers. But then there really will be nothing, and more than The Three, more than the pregnant matter in the sky, this fills me with a terror so primal I feel it is alive inside of me; filling me like the pollution, feeding from me like a parasite.

But I am Wondering. I am breaking one of The Three.

For now there is just the land and me, and Sol, somewhere in the sky. And I am walking, or at least I think I am, to the place where the barren land and the toxic sky kiss on the horizon. And I am walking, I think.