To go back, would I go back, knowing what I know now? A good questions, but one that cannot be answered satisfactorily without explaining what came before.

I was a man then, a different man perhaps inasmuch as any man can be said to be different from one day to the next. He walked in sunlight, saw the trees of that world bloom and die in that world that is now as a dream, a memory and nothing more. It is a land that exists only in the minds of those who want to remember. And who would want to? The land which was so green, so bright with hope and glory. Before the war, before the clouds. Before the end of that world. To remember that is the memory of the severed limb to an amputee, and in reaching for a cup with phantom fingers the memory floods back and crashes into the walls built around the new world with ferocious force. To remember hurts, but it must be done.

The man who I was walked then, as all men do. There were places he went, old places like fields and rivers. Places to be in the bosom of a world that couldn’t remember. The world as he knew it was a cracked place, a place of needs and wants split only by the amount of effort people were willing to put in. He lived a sham, he knew it. His job was of no consequence, like so many others he strove on in misplaced hope that one day something would change. Long nights were taken in looking for answers to questions that he was sure would become clear when he found them. Like a mariner sailing into the unknown to see what lay there, only to find that what lay there was no different and held no greater answers than the port he had left. All life in a nutshell, the nut rotten to the core. The world to this man looked bleak, but not so bleak as to be hopeless. There were moments of clarity amid the drudgery, moments of wonder and surprise that blasted away the cobwebs and strung together like fairy lights of memory lighting the tree of life. The he doubted every answer, but not long enough to care about the answers when they held nothing for him. Now I would say he lived in a world of lies carefully balanced to reflect the truth in a favourable light. It was a phantasm, of course. Everyone was the same, in that age of a small earth and smaller minds. Then, like an ant colony smashed in a rainforest, the war.

He didn’t know, and I still am not sure why there was a war. The first thing to go was the communications. Those communications which had, more than the wheel, the railway or air travel served to shrink the world to the size of a palm. After that no one knew the why or the who, they only had horrible visions of the how. Bombs dropped like snow on cities and kept on dropping on the rubble until there were great radioactive deserts of grit and dust blowing in the wind. He saw the first bombs drop, and after emerging into the tainted sunlight he saw…

Even some memories are too much these days. I can’t, will not, think about it. Traitor seeds sown in my mind, waiting to grow into terror of the dark. I will not let them, so you must know that to describe is impossible.

He saw people then, fresh. They were in a limbo, strange freedom that they had not been aware of wanting. Nor did they know what to do with it now that they had it. But little by little, day by tortuous, fear filled day they lived. They were no longer human cattle, and he cared for them one and all. The muttering of dead men held no sway in that place. Thinking was replaced by doing, and emptiness replaced by hope. It is strange that then, beyond the end of a world, people should become more than they were.

There were no answers then, but there were no questions either. They had to be, or they would die. It was simple, truly simple. But the lights had gone out, and he missed them. I miss them. It is a wretched feeling to have life and want more. I miss the light, the sky, and the world of before. Would I go back, knowing what I know now? I go back every day, to that dream.