The past is always present

   The whole space between Planet B43 and its moon was a huge graveyard. Pieces of different sizes and different materials, floated all around, doing some sort of dance between the planet and the satellite. Some pieces did fall into one of the celestial bodies but no damages were done to intelligent life, as there was none in that section of space. The whole system had been deprived of that for a millennia and it was considered to be a sacred zone, not one to venture into lightly.

 The battle that had taken place only a few months back had been a consequence of miscalculations and a clear disrespect for anything that reeked to the past. Somehow, all the peoples in the galaxy had absolutely forgotten their roots, their common ancestry and history. That planet, which was now classified as empty, with only a letter and two numbers, had been one of the largest hubs in the past, gathering every kind of creature in its heart, making every single one of them feel welcome.

 The temples that were still scattered all over the surface of both celestial bodies were now covered in plants and moss. They had been the key to achieving peace a thousand or more years ago. It was a time when battles didn’t existed, no skirmishes were ever registered, and people tried to live without any kind of conflict. They talked. When they had differences, they agreed on meeting on the planet, which they called Takrut, and solve it there, with the help of other parties.

 There was something similar to a sense of community, even when civilizations would be separated by million of kilometers, of light years and planets and stars. Even with that inconvenience, all of these different creatures had the knowledge to gather and just share what they had all been given. Commerce was key during those times, and it was fair and it made senses to everyone involved in the transaction. No one felt they were taken advantage of or that were loosing somehow.

 The debris that now fell to the planet, sometimes fairly close to the ruins of those temples, was the proof that whole galaxy had fallen away from all that it had once held dear. The battle, which had begun in another sector, had burst into the system with fire and blood and screams, breaking the silence that for so much time had befallen those ancient tombs and sacred places. Respect had died a long time ago and there was no way to get it back, at least not with the current factions fighting each other over beliefs that were up for interpretation, nothing really factual.

A scout ship called Valiant was send to the cloud of ruins in order to try and rescue a piece of one of the ships that they needed in order to continue their fighting elsewhere in the galaxy. It was a piece of a memory bank that the pirates and smugglers would probably find to be of no importance. That’s why coming back after so long was not really a problem. Besides, not running into unwanted company was important, in order to maintain the mission a secret from everyone outside of their own group.

 The Valiant passed by the cloud but realized soon they wouldn’t be able to penetrate it. Even being a small ship, the Valiant could easily be hit by the large chunks of debris and that would leave them stranded on that sector for who knows how long and they certainly had no intention to do so. B23 was a country shrouded in rumors and tales of monsters and dark wizards. Not many people talked about worlds like those, except for mothers when trying to scare their children from doing something wrong.

 The crew of the Valiant decided it was wiser to send an AI unit to do the work. They were always very eager to help and they had no need to breath, so they were the perfect candidates to take a walk in space. A special rope was attached to their charging port to get them back after they had found the object they were looking for. The first unit was sent shortly after arrival but it was soon lost to a large chunk of metal that destroyed it. Its arms and legs floated away, as the rope was pulled in to use on another droid.

 The next one was able to locate the piece they were looking for but was then pierced through the chest by a bar made of different alloys. It had been travelling at top speed, so it was just like being stabbed with a spear or something. They also used other kinds of droids, less humanoid in aspect but faster and better responsible to the commands coming from the ship. It was one of those, a little droid called IC2, who was able to finally get the part they needed to get back to their command center.

 The droid was being pulled into the ship when another piece of wreckage cut its rope, leaving it only a few meters away from the Valiant. The ship tried to indicate the droid how to get into the ship by itself but a surprise visit by a group of pirate ships was enough to make the crew of the Valiant realize they needed to get to safety first and then try to rescue the droid. Before jumping out of the system, the scout ship ordered the little droid to hide among the debris and stay there until another ship came to pick him up. He understood his command and floated, waiting.

 He waited for a week and then for another week but no one would come. As small as he was, his artificial intelligence chip was very well developed, so much so that he could even do things that larger droids couldn’t. The fact that he didn’t really have arms and legs but tiny wheels and some hooks, made him the last resource for any mission, and he knew that very well. But after waiting for so long, he decided something had to be done in order to get the information back to the command center.

As a droid, his priority was to serve, so that’s what he was going to do. However, debris was very difficult to avoid, even for a small droid that was able to avoid being hit with relative ease. One single piece, the size of a little ball, was enough for him to lose his stability and hurl down into B23. Luckily, they had made him with metals that resisted entry through different kinds of atmospheres in the case of an emergency. It certainly came in handy as he fell from the sky towards the jungle.

 The small droid landed in a patch of jungle that seemed to have no trees or plants. The place was rather circular and, in a glimpse, he knew that was not a normal occurrence in the universe. Geometrical shapes rarely happened like that, so randomly and it such vast proportions. He decided to walk away from there and head toward some sort of building he could see peeking through the tallest trees of the jungle that was before him. Those were ancient ruins, something he already knew from his scanners.

  He crossed the jungle rolling through it; trying to avoid any puddles of water and paying close attention to the sounds of various creatures that were probably looking at him, wondering what it was that they were looking at. When the IC2 arrived at the building, he noticed it was a pyramid and that it had an entrance on the base, a rather large one. He decided it was the best place to wait for his owners, so he rolled into the building as fast as he could, not realizing a shadow had moved inside the cavernous entrance.

 When he realized that there was a creature there, it was too late for the little droid. A weapon, similar to an arrow, traverse the droid through what one would call its eye.  The creature, which was humanoid, bent down and grabbed the piece of memory bank the droid was holding.

 The human looked at the piece for a while and then decided to keep it for himself, putting it on a pocket beneath his cloak. He gave one final look to the destroyed droid and whispered something to him, in a language that hadn’t been heard in ages. After that, he disappeared into the shadows.

Two Theresa's

   Theresa had just come out of the asylum. She wasn’t supposed to call it that but she found it was better to call things by their name. She had been there for five months, after suffering a very serious mental breakdown in her office. Thing had been thrown, insults had been hurled and the police had to be called to stop her from hurting more people. Things had really gone badly that day and she had to accept, in front of a judge, the condition of getting help in the insane asylum.

 Her stay there had been largely uneventful, except for the screams she had to hear every single night, that prevented her from sleeping like a normal person. Besides that, she had to go to the shrink every single day, for an hour, and also to group therapy once a week. It was a lot of talking, of listening and of showing others how she felt and looking at people hurting from their pasts or presents. It was kind of tiring at the beginning, but it eventually became part of the routine.

 Same happened with the meds. Her doctor had assigned a certain prescription to her at first, but then it was change several times during her stay in the asylum. The things she had to take, with a little sip of water, kept getting stronger. She had begun losing grip of reality. After having a crisis in her cell, she decided to leave the meds and just pretend she was taking them. It wasn’t easy because they checked everyone afterwards, but she was able to make one of her new friends take them.

 The first week she spent outside of the asylum, she realized how mean that had been. Making someone unstable taker her meds could have been potentially destructive for said person and maybe even for herself. However, she knew that those chemicals would have never helped her at all. She just needed to get away from everything, she needed silence and calm, as well as some time away from everything that bothered her, starting with her job and her family. In short, she needed some sort of holiday.

 That’s why she liked to tell people that her stay in the asylum had been uneventful, just something he had to do in order to please the society that had deemed her unfit to be in society. She tried to fake her hatred of the system and decided to get a job that wouldn’t be as stressful as the one she had before. Over two months after her release, Theresa was able to get employed in a flower shop, taking care of the plants and also attending costumers when the owner wasn’t around. It was a very calm environment, perfect for her. Free of stress and fear.

 However, her family was still around maybe even more than before. Theresa had tried hard to make them understand she needed time for herself, in order to get well again. But they didn’t care about that at all. They were too busy thinking about how others would perceive them. Her mother had many friends all over the city and she had even received some gossip about her own daughter that Theresa just refused to discuss. She had no need or urge to comment on any of it with her mother.

 Her father had been dead for a couple of years and her mother and siblings would always say, when she was around, that it was better that way in order for her not to shame the family name and her father’s prestige in front of the rest of the community. They behaved as if they were kings and queens or something very similar. It was a relief when Donna, the owner of the flower shop, asked her to go for a short period of time to the small town from where she received the flower shipments.

 Apparently, they had been having problems with some of the plants and they needed to get them in line because Valentine’s Day was coming soon and that was their big day of the year for sales. Theresa had shown so much interest in the business and in the plants as themselves, that Donna thought it would be perfect to send her to represent the company. She would have to visit several plantations and tell them exactly what they were looking for, in order to improve sales and wealth for everyone involved.

 She accepted the moment Donna proposed her plan to her. She left a week later, without telling her family or anyone else. She just grabbed a suitcase and hopped on the bus. She arrived there and discovered how beautiful real nature was, how calm really looked and how people lived without so much tension from urban life. She hadn’t realized how her rough lifestyle had been an important factor in the development of her emotional crisis. City life almost killed her.

 When she arrived, Theresa was supposed to stay up to three weeks in the town, travelling to other parts of the region every day. However, she ended up staying more than two months. She only came back to help Donna with all the craziness of Valentine’s Day. Once the season ended, she went back to the countryside. No one ever knew what she did there but the truth was that she had been hired to do the same thing she did in the flower shop. The only difference was that she did it in the open; with real sunlight caressing her skin and that was priceless.

 Her family looked for her through email, mobile and telephone, but they never got to her because she had taken a step back from most of the things the modern world could offer. She visited an Internet café once a week to read some news and chat with Donna and other friends, but that was mostly it for her technological life. Most days were spent in the fields, sweating from early morning to sundown. It was hard work but she loved feeling so tired that no thoughts ran through her mind.

 She would be the first person to wake up, feed the chickens and pigs and then help in the field, doing whatever they asked her to do. She loved tending to roses, sunflowers and dahlias, but she would also work on a potato plantation and picking strawberries and grapes. It was always changing but it was good money for only one person. She eventually got to save enough to have her own little house, from were she could travel by foot to any of her jobs, no matter what she had to do.

 Before her breakdown she had been one of those women that never touched anything without a real necessity. She had a chauffeur to pick her up from her meetings and then take her back home or to the office. She had a maid to cook for her and two assistants that helped her much more than she would admit to. She would be very cold to all of them. Cold wouldn’t be the word as she was never outright mean, she just wasn’t one of those people that liked to hang out with others.

 Looking back at her past, she thought that woman in her memories was someone she couldn’t really recognize. That woman, through some sort of creep psychological magic, had been locked away in the asylum, with all the other crazy people. She was a danger to herself and others and it had been quite a difficult task to get rid of her. Because, before anything else, Theresa had to realize how bad everything was before taking the road to a better life, which is exactly what she did.

 Eventually, she met someone she was able to fall in love with. He was the first person there, in the countryside, to know who she had been and how much she had changed. He praised her for that and acknowledged her might every day of their life together.

 As for her mother and siblings, they kept trying to reach her but she never went back to the city. She just wrote them a letter telling them how her life was now much better than before and she had no need to go back to a place so toxic for her.

Words from within

   I have found myself without words, without a real need to speak out, to talk to anyone. I find every person to be utterly dull, to be devoid of anything really interesting to say, of anything that means something to me. Granted, it is my fault and my perception. I cannot explain why it happens and exactly how, but I realize it is something that is part of me and I cannot shake it off and continue my path through this world. Is not as simple as many people things. Demons are stronger, always.

 That does not mean they win every single time. It means the battles are always hard, filled with blood and sweat. And you will lose some of them, hopefully the ones that don’t really matter. If you lose, you learn. And that’s always good but not really. Because when you learn you have to have a good brain inside your skull. If you don’t, well, learning all you want won’t change a thing. You will always have a narrow-minded view of the world and that may not be the best in your life.

 I have learned a lot of things, I believe, both useful and useless. I know the names of all countries in the world and their capital cities but I have no idea how to use numbers beyond the most essential calculations. I know some things, here and there, about some of the world’s personalities, about animals and things all over the cosmos. But I have no idea what love is or what responsibility means for most of the people. I don’t even know if I want to know, but it’s clearly frowned upon.

 Not talking in a world that yells at you every single second of the day could even be dangerous. How to counter all of that crap that enters your ears and body? By talking, by having opinions and thinking. I do all that except the talking because I have found myself noticing there’s no one there to actually listen. And talking is only worth something when someone is listening and maybe they change their views on a subject because of what you said. That’s not happening to me.

 Granted, I’m not saying every single thing I say is worth something, anything for that matter. But I have realized that, as humans, we do need to be listened and for people to care, in any way possible. We need to feel we matter, that the world would be different if we suddenly disappeared. Sadly enough, the world wouldn’t really change if I died now, only a small fraction of it and only for a small amount of time. That’s not drama but a reality and the truth is not always something we want to listen to. But truth does not care about us, only about what is.

 Yet, I may be too much of a drama queen. Maybe every single thing that I’m thinking and writing right now is just in my mind. Maybe I’m worth much more than I feel to, maybe the world would change if I died right this moment. But something in me does not think so. Something inside of me, in my heart or brain or lungs, is trying to tell me that I’m hollow and that I simply don’t matter. Because another truth is that we don’t all matter and we’re just too afraid to realize that.

 So many billions of humans have lived, many more are alive right now and others are being born right now and in the future. Of all that cluster of human souls, only some of them really matter in some way. Maybe they discovered something or they made feel people good. It is possible they fought wars or their love, branded by words, transcended the borders of speech and time and truth. But those people are such a small group in such a vast amount of people. Just people.

 Yes, we all matter to someone, in a way. We all have parents and sisters and brothers and more family. Many have daughters and sons, lovers and pets. There’s always someone that remembers you. However, that may not be enough to some of us, especially when life has decided to make your life different, to make you the one to go through a path that not many people travel. And you don’t feel honored at all because it pisses you off how you feel like a gamble.

 I don’t speak that much because I hate my life. I don’t hate the people in it, because they have done their best. That’s another truth. But I do fucking hate that I have learned so much and really know so little. I hate that this world doesn’t seem to have a place for me. Each second that passes the air around me seems to be getting thinner and thinner. In some ways, I feel like an astronaut that has started drifting away from the spaceship and only has a limit amount of time left.

 I hear the clock ticking and ticking, passing too fast. Because people think there’s torture when time goes slow but that’s not the real nightmare. It is much worse when hours and minutes and days and years pass in the blink of an eye and you feel you’re still in the exact same place, as everyone else moved around and achieved so much. And you, me in this case, are drifting away more and more. Alarms make sounds all around you but there’s nothing really you can do besides waiting. You try to reach, to live, but life doesn’t really want you anymore.

 That’s how it feels. It feels as if you’re drowning slowly and no one should live through that. Not physically or figuratively. We don’t deserve to be killed in the slowest of fashions, as the world looks at us and judges us for not being brave enough to do things that we have no idea how to do. This world is wild, is a rabid animal that has to be tamed. It’s just a savage beast that wants more and more and more and we cannot all comply with its wishes. Maybe we’re too weak.

 That’s a factor, I guess. We might be too weak for this life or, at least, for the way we handle ourselves and everything around us. I find myself to weak write anything more right now. Every single thing takes a toll on our heads and it’s just too difficult to try to handle everything at the same time. It’s too hard and we’re not the same people that before, year ago. Those rugged men and women are not here anymore, maybe in some places thought. Most of us surrendered to our feelings.

 I just wanted you to think a little bit about the state of your mind, about how you really feel and how you live. Reality is a bitch but it’s the one we have to live in for the time we remain on this planet.

 If you can, help someone else live through this. If you can, help me.

The ways of the mind

Day and night, he went to the gym. And when he wasn’t there, it wasn’t strange to see him on a swimming pool, playing tennis, kicking footballs on a park or just jogging around the neighborhood. Jason had been a chubby kid fro ma very young age and the bullying he suffered in primary school and then high school, made him start his training. He finished high school from home and once he entered university, he was an entirely new person. Many of those who had mocked him, were now envious of him.

 Of course, Jason loved that. He really liked to see the face on the people that had pushed him into lockers or shamed him in the changing rooms after gym class. He had seen a number of them in his university and it was always a pleasure to see their faces when they realized who they were looking at or, even better, who they were talking too. Even the many girls that mocked him in school were now falling for him left and right, forgetting their past words directed at him.

 He had been called a “pig”, a “hog” and a “chubby little fag”. Children can be mean, that’s true. And it’s always blamed on the parents, rightfully so. But Jason had discovered, with time, that all those people that had mocked him earlier in his life had always been that horrible. Yes, maybe they learned at home or they picked it up from the television, but the fact was that they hadn’t outgrown their bullying ways. Even in university, Jason saw how many were made fun of.

 For a while, he tried to help those people that had been left out by society at large, either because they were fat or maybe because they were gay. There wasn’t a single minority that was out of range for those that mocked them. He went to several meetings of college groups, he held rallies and supported the so-called liberals to help improve the situation on campus and he even experimented on a private level to fully realize he was as open and really free as he thought he was.

 The first year in college was good but then he grew annoyed by the crowds, by those who wanted everything to change. They wanted the world to see itself through their eyes, instead of trying to be part of the community. He met very angry people and extremists, where he would have never thought to see any of those. He stopped going to the meeting, supporting political candidates and even helping shamed people to stand for themselves. It had become a burden on him and he felt it wasn’t fair to carry someone’s load when he had so much to process by himself.

 He focused in only two things: his studies and his workout regime. A year before he got his degree, he was able to pay the rent for a small apartment not so far from home. He had gotten a job at the gym he worked out and that had given him enough money to get where he wanted to go. He was to become a real state agent and he would try to be the best at it. Jason had always loved many of the things related to that job and he was certain he could get his license in a heartbeat.

 He started as a part-time intern in a real state agency. There, he could get all the necessary experience to get his license and maybe even get noticed by some of the bigger agencies to get hired for a full-time job, hopefully being the person that shows people houses and apartments. That’s what he wanted to do, for a long time. Jason was even willing to leave the gym regime in order to get his dream job, although he would still try to workout as much as he could on nights and weekends.

 One day, Jason had left for his job from his tiny apartment. It wasn’t a perfect life, but the liked it a lot. He really loved to go and learn a little bit everyday. He had learned some architectural terms, as well as many things an engineer should know about how houses work. He had even been taught how to properly accommodate furniture in order to secure a sale. He was really in love with it all, with every single detail. And it showed. People would often tell him they thought he looked better, somehow more energetic.

 That morning, when he felt on top of the world, an SUV came roaring through his street. Jason woke up really early, so he knew it was uncommon for that to happen. Nevertheless, he didn’t looked back to the noise, as one would have. He was busy thinking about his day, he was busy being too happy about himself and his achievement. He was to busy to notice the SUV had veered towards the building and that it was going at full speed on the pedestrian side of the road.

 A neighbor called the ambulance, several others watched from their windows or from their doors. No one else helped, no one else said a word. The woman that had found him had lost a husband recently, so she knew exactly how it felt to lose someone like that, in the blink of an eye. So she decided to call and help another family not being torn apart. The ambulance took a bit too long to get there. When he got to the hospital, Jason had lost a large amount of blood and the doctors where not optimistic. It was nothing short of a miracle how he recuperated, in a way.

  The hardest moment was when he woke up. Jason knew immediately what had happened. He didn’t have a hazy memory; he didn’t pretend he didn’t know what was going on. The moment his eyes opened, that young man knew his legs weren’t working and they might never work again.  He touched them softly and, when the nurses weren’t there, he pounded the hard, in rage. He wanted to die several times during the course of the next few weeks. Aside from his legs, the rest of his body was fine.

 Well, except for his brain. Because he was pissed with the world, with life and with everyone that owned a fucking SUV. He couldn’t understand how people drove drunk. That was what the police had told him, that a drunken man had being the one that had put him on that hospital bed. But they could not really prove it because the SUV had never been found as no surveillance cameras had ever being installed on that street. No neighbor had seen anything, or so they said.

 Jason grew to hate everyone, especially the days his mother and father came to his house to take him out for some fresh air. After being the most admired man in his gym, he was no a ghost of his past. In a way, he was that “chubby fag” again. He hated everyone for being able to walk and he preferred to be inside, away from others, sheltered from their laughs and their lives. His was over, so he didn’t really mind about anything else. As far as he knew, his life had come to an end.

 However, a young policewoman had entered the force recently. She was called Susannah and had freckles all over her face. She had being bullied at school and now she was a real police office. She investigated Jason’s accident and, with resilience and intelligence, she was able to discover that the person that had run over Jason had not being drunk. Furthermore, he was a former student in the same high school as Jason and also in the same university. He was called for questioning shortly after.

 Months later, he was sent to jail for attempted murder, as he confessed he had hated Jason from day one in high school. He hated that people that he deemed “less” could become successful when others like him, so successful in early life, were now facing the hard reality of life.

 Susannah explained it all to Jason and he thanked her for giving him back his life. Inspired by her, he went back to the gym to try and recover his legs. Nothing was lost forever, not his real estate license, not his legs, nor his will to live. Jason would never again let go.