The once children born in the embrace of metal they would later learn to abhor and walls they would grow claustrophobic to, were now added to throngs of people too many to fit in the tunnel side by side, too diverse and different to even want to. All united, however, by the long march, or at least by that light collecting their eyes like a magnet.

The impulse for people to start their journey towards the light increased as people awakened to the reality of the tunnel. Tentatively, slow paces gave way to strides of hale and vigor, it felt easy at first to make headway and complete the trek in no time. Motley crews rearranged into groups with more relevance between them.

The metal patterns were tracks. As children, they had learned to recognize the first signs of the monsters that would materialize out of the darkness. The rumbling of walls; the tremoring grounds; the slow current from the air pushed in front of the train building up to a gust of wind howling from behind.

By then, people would have already scattered and glued themselves to the walls of the tunnel before the gale came, whaling bodies left and right, and the train ploughed in their midst.

Bangs. Eyes closed. Hands tightened over ears. Focusing on the sound of wheels clattering rhythmically to ignore the thudding. Then the negative pressure, like a giant gasp following the train, unsticking them from the walls.

Wide-eyed, they would stumble back to the center of the tunnel, checking on each other. The aftershocks in their legs massaging the hearts that had fallen there up to their natural position. And they would train their eyes on the light once again. The walk continued, dodging bodies, feet slapping on puddles of water, sinking in mud.

The light beckoning.

Hauntingly horrifying as it was, people adopted different mentalities towards the tunnel. There were the KBOs (keep buggering on), of one mind on the pointlessness of spending a single second in this appalling, bleak place, and hence the necessity of abandoning it as soon as possible. Other people slowed down to admire the flowers that had miraculously grown into such environment, blossoming along the sides; to put a bit of color on the walls; to fill the hollow with melodious tunes for a change; even to make love! The KBOs wouldn’t settle for any of that, and only visited them fleetingly. Sure enough, a look around and you could find the exact opposite. Nihilists, themselves divided into those who laid bare their chests on the metal, and noisy ones who kept lamenting how nothing mattered. Not the tunnel; not the promising light; not even which one they chose. Mostly youngsters, lots of them, though dressed in posh clothes and afforded many recreations, still felt they had been cheated into the labor of being. Yet they seemed to lumber ahead fine and showed no less Olympic feats than everyone else when a train announced itself.

The light at the end of the tunnel barely came closer; the distance hardly yielded to their long walk. Numbers started dropping like flies as more people stayed behind and decided to make their peace with what they had.

‘Well, what do you have?’ the KBOs shouted, making a show of searching around.

People started showing them what they had been working on. Art and music and poetry and various skills. Tunnelhood felt better doing those.

‘They are going to feel a thousand times better in the light! The faster we got there... ’

‘Look at you dazing yourselves,’ the nihilists went. ‘Feeling better is brief morphine, just cheap lipstick on the futility of existence where nothing matters.’

‘By that logic you would be racing for the tracks, you bastards!’

‘But even that entails suffering, first from the twist of the survival instinct hammered into our genes, then from the collision. We’re forced into a fight with our own selves to undo a situation we never applied for. It’s the perfect failsafe mechanism.’

‘Then how come nothing matters when you start with how your existence itself undeniably matters; when mattering is how things carried on for billions of years?’ …

A football whizzed between their heads, and people gathered to watch a game unfold. The whole tunnel seemed to be lost in excitement for once.

And so they trudged on through suffocating dankness. Legs connecting with metal, sloshing through muck, scrambling as trains scythed by. Somehow, the KBOs never seemed that far ahead from everybody.

There’s this now! People called after them, flourishing flowers and symphonies. But they had grown oblivious to them, their senses dulled. Their quest took on a kind of zeal.

Innumerable trains later, the circle of light was noticeably larger. They squeezed their eyes and looked again. It was real. They kept at it and reached where the rail led off into a dark, smaller side tunnel before the opening. Straight ahead they went. A lighter air welcomed them.

They stepped outside finally. It was white everywhere; sloping down to plains a little after the tunnel, snowfields extended as far as they could see. Bodies blown this far by the trains had found graves under blankets of gleaming whiteness.

They wanted to shout hurray but coughed instead; tried to dance but their legs shoveled the snow. They thought nothing of it.

After a period of searching around in the open, it was clear. There was nothing there.

Turning to each other for the first time since getting there, having reached the same conclusion, they saw in one another’s eyes the mummified figures they had turned to.

They looked back and saw the tunnel in a new light.

Children start at the very beginning and go through, generation after another, effectively living their whole lives in the swampy long length of the tube. Forever signaled by the light. Sooner or later the calamitous trains sweep them along to it, to nothing but this glorified graveyard.

Now that they finally made their quest, crestfallen, each of them holding a clear picture of all they had wished to do in their heads with a trembling grasp like a check they were desperate to cash, they turned around and looked at it.

At the tunnel ending at the light.

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Challenge

Write me a love story

SarahBarax

91 reads

Him

Do you clasp your fingers together

Afraid to let your past

Slip through the gaps

Please

Open your fingers a crack

And let my fingers slip

Through the spaces

Of your hand

That carry the past

And instead

Take my hand

Into your future

Challenge

Write about self love

Many people struggle loving or caring for themselves, tell us how you love yourself, or write to inspire people to love themselves more! Post with the most likes wins, can’t wait to read through the entries!

ksilver

37 reads

Internal Bleeding

War. Self love is an internal war; Bloody. Trauma inflicted on my soul because I can’t decide to committ to loving me more. God has been dealing with me lately on this subject. The revelation He gave me is “in doing for myself, I can do for others” or what I won’t do for myself I won’t do for others.” In Luke 10:27 we are told “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ’Love your neighbor as yourself.” If I’m doing the first command correctly, then I’m enabled to do the second command correctly. I will confess I haven’t done either well. Because I fight loving me, I fight loving others. I draw my sword on the very thing I need and need to give. Raising the white flag in my heart will surrender me to receive and freely give. I’m still defining what that looks like for me. I need to speak more gently to myself. I need to affirm myself daily. I need to show grace to myself for my flaws and failures. I need to embrace my strentghs and not only my weaknesses. I need to kill fear. I need to choose myself when others refuse. I need to take responsibility for the woman I see in the mirror. She is worth loving. She is worth saving. She is worth fighting for. She was created in the image and likeness of Jesus Christ, her creator. She is fully known and loved unconditonally, overwhelmingly, and steadfastly.

Challenge

You don't understand...

Write about something that you don't understand or that others may never understand about you or just in general that you want to explain; this is your chance to show what you believe, explain something important to you, or explain who you really are... move me :). Nonfiction (preferable) or fiction, poetry or prose.

RedtheHero

27 reads

Capitalism

I have grown up with the idea that 'Survival of the Fittest' was the natural order of life. Darwinism, a natural competition of life where only the greatest strongest and smartest beings are allowed to live, was the justification for the world as it was and will continue to be. Capitalist ideas of hard work, tough days and hard earned cash were drilled into me by my parents, teachers and my friends. There wasn't a single one of us who didn't want to wake up a millionaire and have the world at our fingertips. This competition pushed me into attending an Ivy League institution where I had hoped to acquire the tools and connections to help me break the poverty cycle of my indigenous nation. It wasn't too long before I realized that capitalism was a facade of what could be and not what is.

As a person indigenous to Turtle Island (North America), I have had the wonderful experience of having a wonderful connection to the land that surrounds me. My tribe, according to anthropologists and historians, have roamed the Southwestern desert for at least 1,000 years. Each generation of people learned to tune themselves with the environment, carefully developing reciprocal relationships with non-human entities. These relationships cultivated into a way of life that emphasizes the delicate balance between humans, animals, plants and the Earth. Each generation would pass on what they knew about these relationships and left road maps for their posterity to follow so that they too would maintain the balance of life. It was a generational responsibility to take care of all aspects of life, the environment and its many non-human inhabitants.

It is commonly assumed that pre-Columbus America was an untouched wilderness that was destined for European advancement. This narrative, although commonly accepted, is not the reality of what the world was during that time. Indigenous people of all nations had a relationship to the land that consisted of reciprocity and humility. Humans were aware of their ecological systems and the food web long before textbooks taught school children about how energy transfers from one organism to another. My ancestors farmed, hunted, built cities and communities alongside their non-human counterparts. All of those non-human entities were considered 'beings,' beings capable thoughts, power and had a role in all life. Human actions of taking - farming, hunting, and building - were done in respect to relationships that were developed with all the beings in the environment. They never took more than needed and were thankful for what they were given.

The arrival of colonists and their systems of power brought with them an alien concept of capitalism. When Columbus was lost at sea, he stumbled onto an inhabited island with several Native tribes that lived in the Caribbean. Although Columbus and his men were beaten by the journey and came close to their death, “savages” came to their aid and saved them from imminent destruction. Yet, Columbus’ thoughts, according to his journal, consisted of overtaking the island and claiming it for his own. And so, the boat of European colonization set sail.

The indigenous populations of the Ameicas was well over 100,000,000 but after nearly 500 years of wars, famine, land acquisition and disease brought with the invaders, about 99% of the population diminished. The desire for capital spurred the stealing of millions of Africans to work stolen land for White invaders who had no conceptual of familial relationships to the land. Slowly, capitalism attempted to destroy what indigneous humans had been maintaining for thousands of years.

As the land was mutilated, raped and permanently damaged, the land began to fight back. Climate change is the response to the unhealthy woes of unlimited consumption and the desire for human-centric living. The severed relationships grounded in communal ties to the land were destroyed, along with human humility. Carbon emissions greatly accelerating climate temperatures is currently bringing the world to its knees as several species of plants, animals and entire ecosystems are starting to die. Capitalism has built the road to self-destruction that we refuse to destroy.

Indingeous people are at the forefront of defending the non-human. Although indigeneous people are less than 5% of the global population, they maintain more than 80% of biodiversity on the planet. Essentially, 80% of all life is being maintained by less than 5% of the population. Their relationships to the non-human are the fundamental philosophies responsible for our healthy bodies, environments and lives. Their resistance to colonial, capitalist structures, through those delicate relationships, has been the most important contribution to human life on a global scale for the past 500 years.

In retrospect, humans of all nations should return to their indigenous relationships to combat climate change. Aside from historical justice, white supremacy based colonial institutions and inhuman concepts of capitalist structures, it is the best interest of the colonizers and their governing bodies to restore the decision making power to the indigenous people of the world. If life is to continue on the Earth, the necessary, life-giving balances must be returned to the care takes of those balances. They know the world better than capitalism and colonizers have ever known it to be. The anthropomorphized view of the world where humans consume and gather capital just doesn’t make sense to me as the world we live in is coming to an end.