Loneliness.
We might sometimes say we pride ourselves on enjoying some ‘alone time’. But spend some time breathing your own air and you’ll start to get bored. Spend a little more time alone and you just might get anxious. Spend a tiny bit more time confined in a place where you are your only company and you’ll start to feel lonely.
And loneliness is just the worst of all. We need human company just as much as we need oxygen. It’s a necessity.
So I try to imagine life without human companionship save my son (Not like I actually have one. Jeesh. But I can imagine). I try to see myself surrounded by a very little amount of survivors that mean absolutely nothing to me in comparison to the huge, desolate mass I am living in.
But I can’t.
And yet I see the dad going inside what used to be his home and find himself attacked by carefully detailed memories that rush towards him all at once. The people who he loved and loved him in return are just images in his brain. And they keep reminding him of what he had. And what he now lacks.
He and his son find themselves in the middle of the snow, trying to manage on whatever little resources they have. And the dad is a master at selflessness when he gives the cocoa to his son and is pleased with just a small cup of water. “You promised not to do that,” says the boy. So apparently his dad is always negating any type of remotely comforting food or entity as long as he can give it to his son.
Does love really make you so noble? I consider myself extremely greedy when it comes to food (Hey, I’m not proud of it) and yet if there was someone who I cared for more than myself and who I loved with my entire heart? God only knows what I would do.
But what I do know is that I would not want my son being born into this type of life. Which is exactly the case. He has never tasted a soda until this day. He didnt’t know what the States were, and for the first time in his life he has come across the glory of what are mushrooms. Seriously, this boy was not born before everything crashed down into a pile of death. This kid was born into this life, and ergo doesn’t have anything to compare it with, which I find preferable to having this perfect pre-apocalyptic world and to compare to my current dooming present.
And I think that’s what the mom thought, too. Of course I find her extremely selfish and bitchy for killing herself in order to be the “lover of Death” because she couldn’t handle strategizing the “pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall.” I mean, if you’re by yourself, with absolutely no one who is impacted by your presence (or the lack thereof) then do it. Go stick a bullet through your brain because chances are either you do it or nature will wither you away at the snap of its fingers. But if you have a son and a husband that love you dearly and you mean something to them? How could you be so selfish as to put your happiness and relief before your kid’s? Yeah, you’ll die eventually, but at least have the decency to try.
But not everyone is brave. Some of us are cowards and we don’t know yet because we have never come to face a situation that would un-shield that side of us. And some of us are heroes. But we will never know.
Because ‘destruction’ and ‘survival’ (real survival) are foreign concepts to us.
Thank God.
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