Took me long enough

   It hadn’t really been a nightmare. I mean, my body hurt and the things I saw didn’t made me jump of happiness but it actually wasn’t a good dream either. It was just a very strange dream in which I had seen people that hadn’t been close to me for a long time. In the dream, we even slept in the same bed, we spent a long time together, sharing moments that only really good friends would share. I don’t remember, but it felt as if I had been dreaming about work but we did not work once during the dream, we just moved around, not worried about anything in the world. It felt so strange.

 It was even stranger when I woke up and tried to make sense of it. My body was actually tied, as I had really been running around my room the whole evening. Those kind of dreams also made my head hurt because the involved an especially big investment of memory and all the imagination I could use. Besides that, my body tended to get very tense when I dreamt about something so tense. Once, my teeth had been grinding so hard against one another that one of them lost a tiny part that I probably swallowed or something.

 I have no idea why it is that I dreamt such a weird scenario, but I did. We were all in a bed, the biggest bed ever I believe. And then this guy that wanted to have sex with me kept insisting all night, even after I had given him a reason to stop insisting with it. I had helped him, if that is the correct expression, but he wanted more and more, touching me and trying to get closer and closer and I pushed back as strongly as I could because, after all, I didn’t wanted to wake everybody up just because that guy was been such a dick.

 But then he tried to do it without permission, almost forcing me to have him. So I pushed and directed what he was using to annoy me towards the guy that was sleeping on the other side. I have no idea what exactly happened, but the other guy almost jumped out of bed and they had some sort of argument that I couldn’t clearly hear. Surprisingly, some moments later, no sound could be heard in that room, except for my breathing and the tossing and turning of the guy that he had directed the annoying guy towards. He realized he was a friend from college.

 Maybe friend was a bit of a stretch because they had never really been friends in the traditional sense. We did study together but that’s as much we had in common. He was from another country and he tended to be always in a mood that would be more appropriate to a rich intellectual. He was always musing about poems and writers. That was in the real world though. In the artificial world, he seemed to love attracting looks to his face. He was annoying in real life; of course he had to be it too in that weird dream.

 However, in my dream, I tried to talk to him the day after what happened and he does talk but he doesn’t say anything about what happened. He really seems like a douchebag but I know the real one is not really like that. I mean, he doesn’t get that far from that description, but I always told him that he was so kind and smart; he could be whomever he wanted with all that knowledge. But that’s who he was, a guy that love to attract attention to himself and that’s fine because at least it’s real, that’s really him and that’s how people should love him.

 The rest of the characters in my weird dream are a little harder to point out. That’s because there were only two that kind of behaved like protagonists and all the rest were just filler, floating around with no real purpose. The other guy was someone I was sure to know but that I couldn’t really place anywhere. I know there is someone like that close by or at least I have met someone exactly like that but I have no idea from what world I drove him out of. All that dreaming and nightmares and so on, made me feel kind of tired.

 I stood up from my bed, and soon realized how early and dark it was. I hadn’t woken up at that time for a while, since I was in high school to be honest. The world outside same to be drenched in a storm made of the color blue. It was just my imagination, I guess. I decided to step into my shower and get cleaned and presentable in order to start the day, even if that day happened to be a Sunday. I had the whole weekend to think about what had happened in my dream. I thought I wanted to let it go, but no, I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.

 Especially about that guy that was basically harassing me. He was really coming forward to me as if we had met before. I was sure we had but I couldn’t remember when and that had really happen or at least I was almost certain it had. The warm water in the shower helped me realize that I did know that guy but only by sight. He was one of my followers on the social network. We hadn’t met or anything but we wrote one another very frequently or at least that was some months ago. I had no idea what had happened to him.

 Maybe he was so very well inscribed in my subconscious that my brain decided to be turned into that villain that we see throughout the movie. Or maybe I actually knew how much I liked him and just wanted him so much that I decided, in my dream, to try and have something with me. Of course, that would make me the one to blame for whatever happened during that whole strange experience. I was fine with that. I just wanted to understand it all.

 I think I wanted that to happen. I mean, not what happened with my college friend in the dream but rather what the other guy was asking from me. After all, it wasn’t everyday that I found someone that wanted me so badly. It had a very bad side to it, of course, but somehow, in a very very sick way, it was a very attractive thing to happen. That’s why in the dream, even there, I was willing to have sex with him once, just to enjoy the feeling of how I would love to have someone that actually wanted me and no one else, even if I was only for sex.

 I got out of the shower and dried myself up pretty slowly. It was a strange dream, just a very weird dream that I should leave behind but I just couldn’t because it was so vivid in my head. I went back to my room and let myself fall into my bed. I was in a towel and kind of wet and even so I didn’t really care about anything else than that feeling that I really was in conflict over something that shouldn’t entail any kind of conflict. It was just a dream and that’s that. I had to learn to let go of things that weren’t’ there to help me but to disturb me.

 I actually fell asleep for an hour or so. When I woke up, I was bit shaken because it was very cold and the towel had fallen to the ground. I was almost freezing so I put some clothes on and decided to go out for a bite, in order to remove his face and presence from my head, from both the good and the bad part of the dream. I couldn’t keep trying to make head or tails of it, so I just wanted to have some peace, at least for a little while. Going out was a good idea.

 I first went to a fast food place and I thought I had seen him there. And then I thought I had seen him in a bookstore and so on. He was everywhere and my mind was obsessed about a person that I didn’t even know who it was. I decided to go back home and just try to relax and distract myself. That worked just fine because I decided to simply not think about it any of it, not what happened or how it had felt. It was all out of me for the time being and I truly hoped to be able to have a normal sleep know that I had gotten over it.

 But then, when I fell asleep again, he came back and he was clearer this time. What I mean was that I could see his face in something very similar to high definition. Thank to that, I realized I had never really met that person. But then I realized something else: as I got closer to him and raised my hand, he grabbed it and caressed his cheek with it, and then he kissed my fingers and looked at me straight in the eye. What happened was that I had fallen in love with someone I didn’t know. How was that possible? Was he real, somewhere or was he just an illusion I had built for myself?

The Age of the Lammergeyers

   Kotor was what we would call a bearded vulture or lammergeyer. What was special about Kotor was the fact that he had an owner, or at least, a human companion, that used him to his advantage. Did not bother the vulture at all as the human always gave him prizes consisting of dead animals, his preferred meal. The bad thing there was that he would rather hunt than eat an already dead prey, but anything was good as long as he was feeding.

 The human used Kotor to survey the mountains. There were a lot of snowy peaks and deep valleys. Also frozen lakes and cold rivers. Kotor surveyed it all and had been trained, for a long time, to look for humans. This proved hard at the beginning because lammergeyers did not really like humans. Granted, they left food everywhere they went, but many of them hunted or chased him for various reasons and that was not acceptable.

 Kotor, however, had been a very young chick when he saw the first human. He didn’t remember if he had been born in the mountains or elsewhere, but he didn’t feel that mattered. The feeling of wind between the feathers was better than any freshly smashed rabbit. It made him feel powerful over all other creatures in those mountains, the fact that he could see them from above. Of course, the land animals were not very thrilled about this and so they tried never to encounter any lammergeyers when hunting.

 This was silly as Kotor never hunted with another bird. To be honest, he didn’t really have any good relations with other animal, except the humans. He was sure that wasn’t a very good thing but the truth was all other birds were scared of him. They even treated him like a pet, saying he worked for the humans than only wanted to invade their mountains and drive them all out. It wasn’t unheard of that every so often, a man would be hit on the head by rocks or bones thrown by lammergeyers. Of course, human thought this was an innocent action but Kotor knew better.

 His job with the two-legged creatures consisted in helping other humans, locating them if they appeared to be in problems. An image of him was stuck on a post in the nearby human settlement. He understood quite soon that it was there to tell the humans to trust him if they ever saw him flying above them when walking the valleys. He knew that if they had blood on their faces or they seemed unusually loud, more than the humans normally were, he had to help them.

 He would normally take something from them and then fly back to the settlement and alert the human called Karma, who would call others, in order to look for the human in distress. They would follow Kotor through the mountains to help. Then Kotor would get his food and could depart in order to fly, hunt, sleep or simply wander around. He thought the humans must have trained others to do the same because it would have been really stupid to make him do all the work by himself.

 What Kotor did not understand was what made the humans penetrate the mountains. Knowing the terrain like few others, the bird knew humans were not properly equipped to live there. Of course, they never stayed, and that was even more incomprehensible. It was like they wanted to suffer on purpose; they wanted to be deprived of food and sometimes companionship, on purpose. It made no sense.

 Kotor envied that from the humans. They were never truly alone and he didn’t understand the one that tried hard to be it. He was alone every single day and it got to be boring. Of course, having someone besides him to compete him was not a very good idea but sometimes he thought it would have been preferable than flying alone so often, not enjoying the rats or rabbits he ate with another vulture.

 One day though, he got to know another lammergeyer. It was a female and, after a few days of courting, he was able to mate with her. They had several eggs and that made Kotor very proud. Due to this happening, he wasn’t as present as before in the human settlement. When he returned after many days of absence, the human he had known wasn’t there anymore. As a matter of fact, no humans were there.

 After checking his young in a tall peak, he decided to fly farther this time in order to know what had happened. He asked other birds that roamed the mountains if they had noticed the disappearance of the humans but most had not noticed it and thought it was better that way because maybe it meant that had left their mountains for good. But Kotor wasn’t pleased with that. He needed to know.

 He flew over the settlement and then followed the course of a river that grew wider and wilder as the terrain began to flatten. He saw many other human towns and cities from above but no trace of the two-legged creatures. Kotor had always thought they were so many, like rats, coming out of every single place. But now they had vanished or maybe they had fled. But why and where?

 Back in the mountains, he informed of his survey to other lammergeyers and convinced them to tell other creatures about it. Of course, they wouldn’t speak with the lesser animals but they agreed to inform the eagles and hawks, as well as some of the land creatures such as wolves and foxes. Many of them had also noticed the disappearance of the humans, specially those that lived from eating the garbage the explorers always left in the valley.

 They all agreed that it was better if no creature left the mountains, at least for now. The humans were not perceptive animals but maybe they had noticed something was wrong and fled because of it. Although not many believed so, it was possible that those creatures knew things they didn’t know. So they decided to do just that, live their lives like they had always done.

 Kotor was surprisingly pleased with this new life. It was a bit weird not to work for the humans but living for hunting and feeding his young, wasn’t bad at all. Yet, he still flew over the human settlement. He didn’t really know why. He didn’t really miss any of them but he had become so attached to them, it was hard not to think about them. Besides, many animals, especially those that used to be hunted, started coming down the mountains to the settlement. Kotor had not realized there was still food there.

 As the lesser animals had not attended the meeting on the mountains, they didn’t know the humans had disappeared or that it was better not to wander too far from their natural environment. They just wanted to eat the free food and in a matter of days, all the food had been eaten. The rats and similar creatures did most of the job and even some foxes and birds had arrived too.

 Kotor, however, never ate anything from that place. He flew over it every so often, but just to check on the place. Many animals had also moved closer to the biggest lake among the mountains. They did not like it before because every human that came into the mountains arrived to that point and camped there for many days. Noisy creatures they were. But now only the wind and the water made sounds and it was perfect.

 Then, one particularly clear day, Kotor noticed something in the horizon. It looked as if the sun had come out again. It was an orange and red glow but it seemed to be increasing in size and the air suddenly felt a bit hotter that it usually was. Kotor landed on a tree and looked at the colour show, that disappeared some time after. Many other animals saw it, and they too went on with their lives, not even thinking what that glow might have been.

 They had no idea that the age of man had finished. The planet had no ruler anymore.