Silent Night

Are we... still... here?

Jeremy now lived a long way from the city, deep in the mountains where no one could bother him. He had been living with his older brother, Tom, for most of his life, though he had always wanted to leave the busy life of the city. It was too crowded for him; too busy with constant talking and constant walking of many little bodies underneath the hood of a skyscraper’s horizon. He didn’t have a bad life– he had a modest job, ate modest food, and lived inside of a modest apartment alongside his brother.

But his life was wildly uninteresting. His modest job hadn’t changed for four years, sitting at a desk and clacking at keys mindlessly, every once in a while having to put on a mask while picking the beige phone beside him, as if some part of him wasn’t withering away each day. And the bland food he ate and the dreary home he laid in didn’t change either– it felt as though nothing was changing in the man’s life. And so, he reached a breaking point, spurring him to take the money he had and suddenly vanish off the face of the Earth. Tom had searched for a long time, calling everyone in the vicinity that could help him find Jeremy, but he never could find him. And Tom lay awake on those nights where Jeremy couldn’t be felt in his castle any longer, wondering if he could have spoken to him about the life he wanted to live outside of it. He had barely uttered a word to him due to how little time they had around each other. He wished that he could have been someone better for him.

He stared into the white spirals that were sculpted into his ceiling, the traces of their spindling guiding his eye until he felt dizzy, though his eyes refused to shut in wake of the thoughts of his own inadequacy. He gazed into the white void sprinkled with snowflakes of dark for hours and hours, until he found himself sitting up in his bed. He felt the cold chill of wind coming through his flimsy window. It called to him like an entrancing song, trying to take his hand and pull him from the safety of his apartment walls to the cold street below him.

And so he walked out into the snowy night, caught in a dead stare that went a thousand miles long. His steps were careful and precise, yet his face remained stone cold like he was caught in the wind’s spell. He walked past the apartment buildings that were now drowned out in darkness. He passed by the office buildings, and the one where Jeremy spent his days slowly crumbling as a Human being and forced to watch himself fall into an abyss of self-loathing and compliance. He passed by the welcome sign to his home city, painted with a blue sky and a fake sunny day that had never come to Jeremy, and which had quickly faded away for Tom.

And he spent hours walking on the side of the dirt road, heading towards the forested mountains that he knew his brother had abandoned him for. Hours felt like days, but the dark of the night was never lifted for even a mere second. The silent droning of the crickets started to meld into a dull buzzing in the mind of Tom, becoming white noise in the background alongside the crunching beneath his feet. Everything around him became a daze– a wave that washed past him but never into him.

He trudged into the forest, where the footprints of many coalesced into a mess of unrecognizable treads that all met each other uphill. And as if in that same spiral, he walked along the side of the mountain, where all the tracks of yesterday’s men and women merged into one abomination. The smear of snow-covered hands and mitts lined the rocky wall, where Tom too dragged his hand in his melancholy. Many-a-stains had lined it, some a soft drag of white, some a scratch of red, and an infected yellow, all mixing into each other to formulate the tales of many who walked the mountain path.

And as he climbed more and more, Tom felt his legs beginning to shake from all the walking. They were screaming for him to stop. For him to go back to that cozy apartment building where nothing got done– where comfort was the reward for complicity in being faceless. Faceless among other faceless that went in and out, to and fro, back and forth. A nauseating mess of bodies that were separate but whole at once, made into networks of nigh-assimilated minds.

No more. There could be no more for him.

And when he hit the valley in the mountain, he saw them all– the many who had traveled up here in that same woe as he and Jeremy had, called by the winter wind to come and join it. He walked past the frostbitten bodies of many, pale vestiges of once broken Humans who had no longer desired that ambitionless comfort. Their faces were contorted, not in peace, but by pain. Some slack jawed with their flesh blue and crystalized. Some still wallowing in that quiet despair with agony as their last memory. Some wide-eyed with pupils contorted into bubbles as they had stared deep into the whispering wind. What it was they saw in the wind was its own secret, sat in their ice thrones in the mountain valley, chairs carved out just for them, and soon connected to their bodies forevermore.

Tom walked past them all, taking a seat beside the man he had thought abandoned him and sat by him. He looked into the starless sky, hearing the intensity of the winds swirl around them, as if to keep him here despite his willingness. He didn’t take his brother’s hand, nor did he even have the strength to look at his frozen vestige. He sat in this despair all his own, watching as his bare, pale, broken mixed with the dirt and rock and blood and ice began to become part of the Earth.

“Are we… still… here…?”

Was all he uttered as the winds took him.

His brother’s eyes flicked to him, as did all the others, before turning back into the dark abyss.