Ghosts of the Future

--- yeah don't judge... this is oooold. i don't even recall from when------

            Long ago, when the land was still wild, before train tracks were ever laid into the ground, animals would, through some fatalistic premonition, avoid the areas where the trains would one day pound. The horses and deer could hear the rattle of the trains and the screeching stops, before the steam engine was ever conceived. They could hear the ghosts of the future.

            Soon they began to hear the obnoxious yelps of car horns traveling on and battling the wind, but these sounds were everywhere, and there was no escaping them. It was the big iron monsters, the locomotives, with their terrible momentum and hypnotic song that frightened them the most.

            Do you know why it is so many people are depressed these days? Why we have so many physical and spiritual suicides? It’s because we too can see the ghosts of the future. We are all so dangerously myopic, but in the corner of our mind, we can’t help but see. The ghosts confronting us aren’t nearly as sweetly deafening as the armor clad juggernauts that lingered in the past. Our ghosts carry the smell of singed life and flowering death. Our ghosts show us the vast difference between fright and unmolested horror.

            We live in a nuclear age and we will die in a nuclear age. The ghosts of the future crackle with radiation and terror. We all see our end. We all fear it. Unbeknownst to us it is the root of so much unhappiness, though we direct this fear into other more obvious outlets. Most do not run from this imminent threat. They flock to it in a passive attempt at mass suicide. Why do you think cities are born? We taste imposing destruction (something so abominable and beautiful as total annihilation resonates thousands of years before it actually happens) and we hone in on it.

            The cities will not have a monopoly on the suffering. They are merely for those utterly devoted to the end, not for those who only celebrate the coming end once a year with fireworks. Watching the explosions and letting the white flashes burn into their retinas, like the images burned into their mind, like the flash that will simply burn.