Fragments from the Vault #27: The Long Haul

Look to ourselves: We are the light...

____________________

Game: The Last of Us

Location: Outside of Jackson, Wyoming

More information: Jackson | The Last of Us Wiki | Fandom

Relics of another time. Photo credit: FetchQuester

I welcome the darkening hours in my solitude tonight, my beloved just hours away, packing the last crate. By sunrise the port will be pouring into life, the slippage of old world vestiges punctuated by the heave-ho of taciturn fisher-women, unfazed, unaware. A blessing. They will send me down the river; before long, I'll hear your laughter like warm sunlight on my cheeks, a thousand millivolts like the storms of paramecium. 

I will evade the transient charge of sleep, querying how dreams are mirrors to alternate universes; that in longing, threads of our being are stretched across the dimensions calling us home in communal song. The golden age of space travel has been and gone, I will grieve as we drift past the crater-bowls of telescopes guarding the pre-drawn light; for even the enigmatic scramble of a nebula cannot reach the poetry of our imagination.

And without rebuke, I'll reflect on Ophiocordyceps, once renowned to mycologists and practitioners of medicine, now reviled by the common world. By its inherent nature, it adapts. It endures. It survives. And it, too, is intertwined by complex networks of seemingly telepathic sustenance. But it has no consciousness or the resilience of sentient life. It does not understand the precariousness of what it is to be forced into the breathing space of one's own mortality, or what meaning can be made from this revelation. It does not create, for it only grasps feral replication in the host; even the notion of destruction - creation's cardinal counterpoint - lies beyond its reckoning.

But we comprehend something even greater in its fortitude: That we exist - and could only exist - under a series of fortuitous conditions - and hold this in our hearts is miraculous. And it is equally miraculous that our threads have stretched across this universe - the same universe that will perish and be reborn anew - to find and nurture one another as we traverse the dark abyss and emerge from the other side with a vigour for life that is beautifully - though not exclusively - human. That is how we endure and survive. And as of tomorrow, when old Sol lights up our hemisphere with a fragile promise... that is how we will thrive.

I will see you soon, my love. With the new vaccine.

Forgotten eras. Photo credit: FetchQuester

- Lucy A.

***

Sources: 

The Last of Us (Naughty Dog/Sony Interactive Entertainment); fandom.com; [note "endure and survive" is a direct quote from The Last of Us]

*Dedicated to Tray.