Confused I stood shaken for a moment with a blank facial expression.
“Grandma aren’t these people just like us?”
“No, you are too young to remember the past and how things were. You will never understand why they chose to live that lifestyle over ours.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“The ways of life are not always meant to be understood.”
…
As the lights within the city had dimmed into nothingness. The nothingness had filled within me. Gazing as the fire consumed these giant pillars of steel below our secluded sanctuary. Yet calmness had overtook me knowing the burning bodies would be free from their earthly constraints. Their ashes scattered into oblivion by the world’s natural and desolate winds.
The only physical memories I had left of the bodies were from the old images I had viewed in a few worn-out storybooks I learned to read from. Within these worn out books the images showed another reality. A reality I could consider joining but one I ultimately could never be a part of.
It depicted how the city slickers had loved their families, built their homes, established their hopes, and created their dreams of what they wanted to accomplish within their lives. What I saw was a perfect reality. One I had longed to have replicated here one day; yet it was a reality that had never truly existed in over a millennium. It was a reality built by the natural longings of past men yet destroyed by today's men’s own abuse of technological vices.
These stories were meant to deter my mind away from the true reality of nuclear war, world famine, and death that I was living. The books served as propaganda to tear me out of the current world and place my mind into a natural land that no longer existed. Maybe the images I viewed were at one time a part of a positive reality from long ago or maybe they were not. Unfortunately, this answer is unknown as the city slickers died with it buried within the embers that adorned their post-apocalyptic metropolis.
As dawn turned into daylight I viewed this moment as the loss of my simplistic innocence of the natural world’s order. Thoughts of a reality I thought I once knew from the books I read were now erased forever. I still have many unanswered questions left within life, but I take away from them a new reality. As this was the night the blazing light had created a new dawn not only for the world beyond our hill but for the developing progressions within my mind.
…
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
― Albert Einstein.
Morgan Raddatz
incinerated