Garden of CorpsesReticent Memories

Aleah Ryan abomination to reality, a disgrace to the cycle of things. Mother Nature rebuked him and anyone who lived such as he.

Koen ruffled the black hair that rested just past his shoulders, his eyes slowly matching the dark colour more and more by the day. His tanned skin was worn with scars, and he couldn't help but dwell on them as he analyzed his appearance. His hands traced the marks that made their way across his chest and shoulders. War.

He remembered the days just as any other. The desperate pleas to survive so that he could see Jesse again as he and his comrades curled up in the ditches while the screams raged on around them. Oh, how desperately he just wanted to be able to see Jesse.

They all fought to defend their beliefs; their country. The cultist rebels wanted to take away the cure. They all claimed it was by the demand of Mother Nature.

Only now did Koen see what those souls had shouted about for so long. Only now did they all see how reality did not submit to the will of man so easily. Only now did humanity understand its insignificance.

Koen slammed his hands on the edge of the sink, his muscles tensing as he forced himself to not break anything. He was never a man of anger and he refused to start now.

With a strained breath, he relaxed and put on a forced smile. He opened his mouth and pulled back the side of his lip, scrunching his cheek. He examined his teeth before sticking his tongue out. The split down the middle had nearly healed.

Koen winced, just as a child would when receiving a flu shot. Muscle memory just meant one couldn't forget the sensation of true pain. He shut his mouth quickly and rubbed his tongue along his cheek to try to get rid of the feeling.

He was just as bad as everyone else. At some point, he had tried to find a way out, despite knowing the futility of it all.

Koen shook his head and stepped back from his reflection. He hated looking at himself, now more than ever. There once was a time when he could believe in loving himself because he knew for certain that someone loved him all the more. It made him feel valued.

But the body that was once loved wasn't this one. It may have been the same skin with all the same scars, but it was not his own. It was not the one the person he valued had loved in return. It wasn't his, merely that of an imposter.

He finally dragged himself away from the creature in the mirror that he struggled to claim as himself. Refused to claim, rather.

Koen lethargically made his way across the hallway and down the steps, keeping his eyes trained on the floor so the pictures that still hung on the wall didn't taunt him. He couldn't bear to look at them, the version of himself that had once been so real, yet he couldn't bring himself to take them down either. Jesse had hung them.

With a breath, Koen held his hand to his forearm. Every day he wanted to hate. Hate the world, hate the doctor who had put all this into motion, hate the captain that would have sent him to his death. He wanted to hate the government for not seeing the end is near. He wanted to hate the cultists who tried and failed to warn the people.

He wanted to hate himself. And sometimes he almost wanted to hate Jesse.

How could he? Hate Jesse, of all people? With age may come wisdom, but with time comes bitterness and Koen had endured far too much time and not enough age.

He was one of the soldiers to receive the cure for death while deployed. Faced with two choices, Koen could only either decide to die at the hands of a bloody war or live forever to see Jesse. At the time, the general public had just begun to have the option to receive it—at a steep price, that is, unknowing of the revelations about the accursed vial that would come out some-odd years after.

But no matter the available knowledge, Koen would've still chosen to live if he was given the opportunity again. An eternity of suffering just to be able to live as much of a life as he could with Jesse would always be a fair trade.

Maybe, just maybe, if Jesse had had the opportunity to take it too, things wouldn't be so bad. But Koen knew he never would've wanted his person to endure an eternity. In that way, Koen was beyond grateful that Jesse had never trusted the cure enough to take it. No person who now had the power to live forever wanted to.

Koen wandered his way into the kitchen and picked up a small pill container from the counter and shook it carefully in his hands. He popped open the top and dumped however many were willing to fall out into his hand, rolling the teal capsules between his fingers and palm.

Every day Koen fought with the idea that, if he had just taken the opportunity given to him and accepted the cure to life when it was first offered, he wouldn’t be stuck here. But he knew why he didn't, and why he never would if he had to live his life all over again.

He couldn't have just died and left Jesse for however many waking years his person had left. So, Koen chose to live in the abandoned world with his love, aware that he would never be able to take back his decision.

Koen let the saliva in his mouth build up before bringing his palm to his lips, virtually swallowing the smooth capsules dry. After so many empty years, a man learns a trick or two.

He had only begun taking the hallucinogen pills after Jesse passed, as he never endorsed drugs in his lifetime. But now… now Koen didn't consider his existence to still be a part of his ‘lifetime.’ That had ended when he had to carry the body of his person through the desolate streets and bury it alone. There was not a minute after that Koen still considered his life.

This was his never-ending purgatory. One that he and the few other forsaken souls that remained were forced to endure alone.

Koen leaned his weight onto the marble counter, closing his eyes as the pills ate away at his empty stomach, their strong contents breaking down painfully as he absorbed them. He let himself sit down, groaning a raspy breath as the pain subsided and his limbs began to tingle.

The world blurred and slanted as his reality shifted. He held his knees tight to himself, yet all the same, the crescendo of sounds and sensations made him feel powerless. The whirling of shapes and colors disoriented him, and before he knew it, he rested on his back, staring up at the ceiling as he waited for the delusions to settle.

The painfully familiar voice called from just beyond the walls and Koen glanced around from his place on the floor. The rusted metal hinges and worn wood of the nearby cabinets were distorted, flickering between a psychedelically bright version of themselves and reality.

“Why are you on the floor?”

The voice traveled ever closer and Koen turned his head towards the kitchen entrance where he watched the red and green blur of the Christmas socks that Jesse wore nearly every day step towards him.

“I couldn't tell you, love.”

The figure stooped beside Koen's head, letting out a low breath as it leaned against the leg of the kitchen table.

“You know, it’s okay to not be quite okay.”

“Whatever could you mean?”

“After a while, these things don't produce the illusions you'd want, my love.”

Koen tilted his head, letting his neck relax as his cheek squished into the cool, hard floor. It was true. After so many years, the drugs wore down the mind to the point that their effects were hardly as vibrant as they once were. The teal pills that once brought him back to the perfect world only granted him the blurred edges of past memories now.

“But I can still get to feel your presence, Jesse. That's more than enough.”

“Even when you're doomed to wake up and remember you're alone.”

“Not now, Jesse.”

Koen brought his hand to his eyes as he let out a breath. Even in a fabricated reality, Jesse always had to be the pessimistic realist. All the same, Koen relished in the sensation of his person, even if he knew none of it was real. Even if he knew it was just recycled memories. Even if he knew it would slip through his fingers like grains of sand when the time came.

And so, he let himself lay alone on the kitchen floor, savoring the delusions while they lasted. ~

The scuttling sensation across his skin was what finally woke Koen from his dazed state. He jerked up, batting the unidentified creature off his leg in the dark. Hours had passed, and the day had been wasted away, just like all the others.

Koen hauled himself up from his place on the hard floor, his muscles sore and stiff as he clung to the counter for support. He drearily wobbled to the sink and flicked the faucet on, bringing his mouth to the tinted well water. After a moment of drinking, he heaved, the empty contents of his stomach splattering into the sink's basin. It was a dry and burning sensation as the combination of stomach acid and drug residue scraped at his throat.

“Bloody hell,” Koen rasped, his voice wavering as he bit back tears. His hands clenched the metallic edge of the sink, trying desperately to stop his arms from shaking.

His days were spent trapped in this despicable cycle. Nothing had meaning to his wornout mind as, with each passing moment, he felt himself slip away all the more. It hurt him inexplicably to know that he'd be forced to watch the person in the mirror, the person that Jesse had once loved, crumble away into nothing but bleary memories. All the while, Koen's husk of a body would continue to wander the world, forcing his mind to stay alive, whether or not it was truly living.

At the end of the day, when dusk becomes incomprehensible from dawn, the fact that humans are social creatures dooms them to be lonely ones as well. When left to themselves, there is nothing to hold their identity together, so they crumble.

Until there’s nothing left but reticent memories in a garden of corpses.