Friday, August 16, 2013

Sunny Day

This post is brought to you by the letter Beckley.

So Josh and his wife have left Haven, as you know.  The sun is shining, life is pretty decent, and yet I’ve been in kind of a funk since then.  You know the feeling you get when you move to a new area?  It’s exciting, but you just feel down and lost.  Maybe it’s just me who gets like that.  Regardless, that’s where I’m at today.

And don’t get me wrong, Haven itself hasn’t actually changed.  It’s just that Josh and his wife were the first two people to accept me when I defected from the UAS.  Others did as well like Will Price and the hamburger couple (I’ve really got to learn their names, but they refuse to tell me.  They just keep telling me my food is getting cold.)  I guess it’s that Josh is the voice of Haven and now he’s no longer here.  It’s weird and even though Haven hasn’t changed, it’s like it has.  I feel like I’ve moved yet again.

I moved a lot when I was younger and my time post-Fall has been spent as a transient.  I did spend a little time in a survivor camp in Pittsburgh, but I was going through a lot while I was there.  The reality of The Fall had hit me and I’d had to do things that I normally would have never done.  I think we can all remember that time when we first did something that, in The World That Was, would have been unthinkable but in The World That Is, becomes necessary for survival.  I was going through a ton of survivor’s guilt, shame, and so on.  So even when I was at that camp, I was pretty standoffish.  I just did what they needed me to do.  A little light therapy and a lot of zombie hoard head-smashing.  It took a while for me to get used to the idea of belonging somewhere.  That’s about when the marauders rolled through and butchered everyone and those of us lucky enough to escape scattered.  There are not words for how much I hate marauders.

I think I mentioned way back in my first post how I just wandered after that and eventually found the UAS and bought right in to the lie that The World That Was and The World That Is could be reconciled.  I really tried to belong there, but it never seemed right.  Part of the reason I originally spoke out in favor of the UAS was because I wanted so badly to feel like I belonged.  Really, Haven is the first time I’ve actually let down my guard and allowed myself to settle somewhere.  I’ve never had that before, even Pre-Fall I was always expecting to have to move somewhere else eventually.  Now I’m here and life shakes itself up.  Kind of.

Not that I’m mad at Josh or disappointed or anything.  It’s just weird to be reminded of what I always knew before.  Everyone moves on.  Some move, some die, but we’re all transient to a degree.  And I don’t mean that in a nihilistic way.  It’s just realistic.  We all move forward in life.  Even when we try to stand still, inertia caries us inexorably forward.  Things change and we all adapt.  Josh has his new home and we all have to get used to our home again, this time without the man we assumed would always be there.  How, in this world of death and the ruins of an extinct society, did we get the idea that we were all here permanently and would never go away?  We’re like kids once again, who can’t comprehend the permanence of death.  Like Big Bird insisting that he would see Mr. Hooper tomorrow.  You’d think we’d have learned that lesson.  Yet a guy leaving to make a new life for himself still strikes us as strange.

Humanity is really weird sometimes.

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