How to let go…?

- Part Two -

Today, it is morning as well. Just like on that fateful day, the mist is out and
about, changing the world, filtering everything our eyes can glimpse.

But this is not the thought-up mist that was as much a construct of my mind as
an insinuation of my own future upon its past self.

No. This is the real deal. This is the world of today. And today, the mist is always
there.

I roam the empty streets which once were my neighbourhood. For Nostalgia’s
sake. For my own sake, and that of my humanity. Or of whatever’s left of it.

I can still hear the delightful sound of Teddy’s singing. Once an unnerving noise
that would daily rip through my eardrums and drag me, motionlessly kicking
and silently screaming, away from the world of my dreams… now a most
pleasant and mournful memory of one of the sweetest friends I ever had.

Dogs. Such enchanting and marvellous creatures. How I miss them, so much
more than men and women themselves.

Today, I drag a pair of feet along the concrete, and I wash an eye over the
buildings and houses, remembering, seeing, hearing, smelling what once was
but is no more, and won’t ever be again.

I say an eye, because the other one of the pair is gone. Just like any real life to
ever exist in this body, gone. Nothing but an empty shell, a husk without
something to fill the infinite void left by the absence of a soul. And so, I take
that place, I inhabit the body and I take the chance to roam the streets of a
ravaged world.

I miss the company of Man’s best friend not because there are no dogs left –
since, in reality, they are still alive and kicking – but because, just as our own,
their “humanity” is all but gone. Theirs was the species, out of all the wildlife
in our tiny – vast – world, which suffered the most since Man became an
endangered species. They truly were our best friends, and deeply did they
mourn our loss. The howling had gone on for days, all over the world, as if the
Earth itself were crying.

Reality… who am I, really, to speak of reality?

How would I truly know what is real or not? What is dream, or what is the real
world? For all I know, I may have been sleeping for all of this time. Maybe the
dream really did become truth, and maybe this is the actual curse, that I am
trapped in this dream world, locked away from all that could be waiting for
me, out there. How ironic… how much I still wonder, today. Nothing, really,
has changed, has it?

Or maybe this is my own personal version of purgatory, or of hell itself. Maybe

Yet, here I am. Unable to forget anything at all. Unable to let go of what I once
had, of what I once lost, and, most of all, of what I was never able to truly have.

You see, the morning after that fated one, I never did awake once more. Not
as I had done so for all the years of my past life. Not as the person I was, back
then.

And in my reality, neither did the rest of the world. The rest of the Human
world, I mean. All but a few select ones – I would say no more than one tenth
of the Human population – never rose from their beds again. I came to realise
later that I had, on that morning, glimpsed, one day earlier, into what would
become the fate of my kind’s world.

There have always been what we would call monsters. Back then, though, they
were creatures of the night, surviving in the shelter of darkness, largely
outnumbered by Man. Now, empty husks of what were once men and women
prowl the streets, foraging for food, with no other driving force than that of
consuming all life around them.
Or maybe there is something else in here. Another presence, some semblance
of a consciousness which exists in the minds of these shadows of Man. Yet, it
is not their own, not their will that makes them keep ticking…

The mist… it may resemble natural mist, yet it is all but natural. These
creatures, they do sleep. Not regulated by the time of day, or by any such other
clock that I have managed to make sense of, but they do, from time to time,
sleep. And when they do enter such a state, they release a constant stream of
an unknown gas, deadly to humans, even those that, for whatever reason,
survived the fall.

This is why the small fraction of humanity that does live on to this day, hides
underground, sheltered from the toxic atmosphere that would slowly, but
steadily, forcefully recruit them to the legions of the hollowed.

The fall… fitting that they would call it that. It did, indeed, drive the remaining
portion of humanity down below, beneath the dirt, after somehow enslaving
the rest to this… unlife.

The world is theirs now. The monsters still do wander the surface, now no
longer bound to hide in darkness. Werewolves, vampires, mermen, the
undead… all which was once the stuff of nightmares. I am a part of that world
now, even if I have yet to encounter another one such as myself, who has
overstepped the boundaries of the physical realm, who has become ethereal.

And what could that mean, for me?

Am I bound to eternal loneliness?

Once, that could have meant eternal freedom… it could even equal that once
again… if only I could let go…

If only I could let go…