Memento Mori
The only thing I know for sure is that all the philosophers were wrong. Death is not pleasant nor something to not be feared, death is cold. Dante was right by setting the 9th circle of hell in ice because torment is not burning eternally it is being gnawed by frost’s relentless bite.
The slow thawing was when I regained conciousness. Not some half-assed pediatric conciousness but Jungian conciousness, acute awareness and wisdom. The reverberations of life permeated my body as waves of sensation crawled across my frame. It was like being stabbed over every inch of my body.
As I began my slow journey outward I began to sense more and more. My eyes adjusted to light as if they had been hibernating and needed to relearn how to see. My body began to shiver from the cold as my feeling bagan to return. Torents of sound richotcheted around my brain like bullets colliding isnide of my skull.
It took a few minutes to relize I was not alone. I truly think that for a few minutes I beleived I was the only man alive, blissful minutes. The men who stood around me were tall, but I had no great claim to perception of height because when I looked across the room I saw a drinking glass stand seven feet tall.
“His irises are uneven and they keep unfocusing,” one of the doctors said. But to my untrained ears it sounded like a hoard of racoons clawing through trash,
My sight remained tinged for a few minutes but soon my senses began to dull. The heightened state of conciousness, however, did not leave me.
It was days before I could remember why I had gone into the cryochamber. Peices of the complex puzzle of life formed in my mind and slowly conected. The yound boy who would one day become Adolf Hitler. My mother who carried me a few years to early so that I would have to serve in one of the biggest blood bathes known to man. The mother of a future German soldier who would throw a hand grenade near me in such a precise location that only a few shards hit my frontal lobe leaving me wounded but not dead. The years of trying to find expieremental surgeries to remove the shards and finally my retreat to the cryochamber.
If even one of those peices had been altered slightly, it would have changed my future and subsiquently made a blemish in the overall history of mankind.
I was under constant surveilance, as if I were in the Soviet Union and not the United States of America, in the facility.
I was given a small room, which resembled a hotel with plad curtains and a TV. The TV I was given was like I remmebered: small, boxy and black and white. They told me a lot had changed but if the TV were a symbol for how much things have changed then not much seemed to have shifted. This beleif was soon destroyed as I eyed the mini fridge (that is what I was told it was called.) The shelves were decked with food that I did not recognize.
As I was inspecting my room for clues of what the future meant for me, a doctor entered my room.
“I assume that knocking is a foreign concept in 2019,” I said sarcastically to the doctor. His only response was a shameless chuckle which infuriated me.
“I do apologize for that, but I am very eager to be talking to you. There are only a handful of people who have been frozen for as long as you have and survived.”
“Please get to the point of why you are here I wish to sleep,” I said with a hint of distaste.
“Yes of course. We have given you scheduled times that you may leave with an assistant so that you may begin to familiarze yourself with the world,” the doctor said.
“If this TV is any indication of what this world has become then I will not have to familiarize myself with much,” I responded.
“Oh. That is not what televisions look like now. We have tried to decorate your room in a manner which fit your time period. Televisions are very large now.” My superiority wavered at this. Up until this point I hadn’t thought much about the advancments of human technology because I had beleived it hadn’t advanced too much.
“Well I guess we will see how I can handle it,” I say incredulously, “Now please leave.”
The doctor swiftly got up and drifted out the door.
The first thing I noticed, when I left the facility, was that cars had advanced so that they looked like sharp wasps instead of fluid worms. They moved faster and vibrant colors splashed across each one. Even the dull greys and browns were glossy and colorful.
The second thing I noticed, as we drove into the suburbs of New Jeresey, was the ammount of people. I was told that we were still leagues away from any actual city, but swarms of people choked the streets. They were all different colors, mixing together like choclate powder in milk. Like ants, they all flowed from there dwellings and recreation centers clogging the world.
We eneded at a park in New Jeresy outside of all city limits. The grass had seemed to dull in the years since I had seen it. The clouds were darker as if they had been pumped with gasoline (I later figured out that was the case).
I envisioned my world, my life in the fold of this gargantuan monster of planet. I was enveloped in the claustrophobic feelings which were created from the sheer ammount of people I had seen.
The park itself seemed so uncomfortably unsanitary that I retreated back to the car. The trees were the only thing which hadn’t changed all too much. They stood like sentinals of time unhindered by its flow.
It reminded of a story I had been told when I was young. It went a little like this, “One day a strong storm swept across a forrest leveling many trees. As one of the trees fell, it landed next to a little fern which had not fallen. The tree, while laying there, asked the fern ‘how is it that I have fallen and you have not?’ The fern responded, ’Dear friend, the wind is proud, for this reason we ferns bow to it whereas you trees stand steadfast. You would not have fallen if you had shown humility.”
I found myself seeing the planet in the same way. The advancments made by human kind were just the steadfast stubborness of the tree and one day soon, I am convicned, we will follow that fate.