The Curtains Fall

The Curtains Fall

By: Aris

Weiss encouraged me to believe in Ryan- to believe that he would emerge back into our sheltered life with supplies and food, enough for us to start something here- something worth living for. So, I believed in him, even as the others slowly started to lose their nerves, eating away at the remaining parts of our food, trying to distract themselves with entertainment, watching slowly as our deaths began to march towards us. Yet, Weiss and I held strong, trying to pull together all the broken fragments of our souls together.

We tried. We really did. We tried to grow crops, we tried to call for help, we tried to keep our morale up. We tried our absolute hardest to keep believing in the Ryan that might never come back- to keep on surviving until he brought us relief. It was as though we had formed a miner’s coalition in this cave, trying to mine enough space for all of us; trying to make the little food we had last us.

Death was hanging over us - a feeling I’d thought we’d never need to understand again.

I suppose we all never realised what it feel like to finally start dying- feeling for once what it felt like to watch all your organs stop functioning, feeling the weight of despair crash over... To feel for once how the victims of the Titanic felt. I don’t think I’ve ever heard stomach rumbling this loud; heard laughter so psychotic; seen faces so deranged and thirsty. People I thought we my friends started to stare at each other like animals. Perhaps even thinking of them as a sacrifice necessary for survival.

An apoptosis that we’d probably deserve.Things were so quickly devolving out of our control, so much so that even I started to lose myself. Weiss kept me believing it was just a symptom of our hunger, kept on saying it was just the hunger. Maybe he was trying to convince himself.

Darius even dug up the plants, trying to reserve the process to get by our products. We all know how that turned out. Zi Lun and Louis tried stepping out of the cave but every time they tried, the monsters would jump down, as though showing us how far we could go, how far our boundaries were. They probably had no intention of killing us- they just wanted somewhere they could call home

Or maybe they wanted to watch us struggle.

I think it was days before we last heard from Ryan- and by that I mean saw him leave the cave towards the monsters. Too long have we waited for a miracle, and maybe finally it’s time to you know... throw in the towel. We’ve fought it for so long, but it could finally be the time for us to pass the baton to other people. I don’t know...

We don’t deserve the lives we’ve been given... I know. It’s time to give them to some one else. Some one better.