To Live in a Dead World

Pain fills each dismal day

And haunts my fitful sleep.
Ultimately, all must pay
The charge that Death will reap.

Here I lay, with naught to say;
Whose fault is it but mine?
Here I stay, in my last day,
And . . .

. . .

~~

Bah!

In disgust, I hurl the pen across the room. Or, I try to do so, but the quill pen's large, billowy feather of bright pink quickly traps the stale, sickly air that tried to pass under and through it, and it falls to the ground not five paces from my bed. Truth be told, though, I probably could not have thrown it much farther even without the feather. Such was the effect of my current state of health. As much as I hated to admit it to myself—although I had to do it, again and again—my sickness had affected me that much.

It had come on slowly at first; indeed, doctors suspected that I had had the strange disease for a year or more before it started to display its evil powers, and it had taken another two years for it to prove itself as dangerous as they had feared. More dangerous.

For the first few months after the diagnosis, I had seemed fine, even to myself. Truly, others had noticed the changes in me—the sickly weight loss, the wan complexion, the increasing rapidity at which I grew fatigued—before even I myself saw them. Then, once I took notice, the transformation had seemed to speed up dramatically. I became unable to stay up and about for too long at a time without extended rest. Later, I would not even be able to stand for a few minutes without growing dizzy and needing rest. After a few months more, I was forced to spend most of my days sleeping.

The loss of energy is only one effect of my damning illness. I cannot keep food down any longer, and what I do manage to eat and digest seems to do little to keep my body from decaying into an emaciated shell. My skin has become so painfully sensitive that it hurts to wear clothing, and yet even in the hot summer I freeze without many layers of it. At just under forty years of age, I am a feeble, skeletal version of my former self.

For a time, though, I had maintained high spirits. I tried every new medicine that was brought to me, and tried to continue on as I normally would, optimistic that I would eventually be cured. Even as my condition worsened, and it became impossible for me to perform live concerts—which had been my favourite part of life as a successful musician in a massively successful band—I still plodded on and waited for a magical cure.

Then the world broke, and my spirits with it.

Like most common people, I have no idea of the details. I know not how the world came to be as it now is, only that it is a bleak and dead place. We that survived the cataclysm find that we are trapped in a world where nature is inanimate, and civilization all but completely crumbled. No crops will grow. People live in poverty who but a year ago were wealthy. People who only a year ago never had want for anything, starve to death in fields that should be filled with corn or potatoes, or cattle.

I quickly found that it was not a world in which I wanted to live. And when that happened, my life was over. My illness continued to steal away one aspect of my lifestyle after another, until now. I am a vegetable.

The disease has taken a toll on my mental faculties as well. While I can still communicate as eloquently as ever I could, I have been debilitated in one most abhorrent fashion.

I can no longer write songs.

Well, good songs anyway. I can still write, when I have the energy to lift a pen, and I am still master of my vocabulary. But simple words and musical notes on paper do not a song make.

It seems to me a strange thing that I, at one time considered to be among the greatest songwriters in the world, could so expressively and poignantly convey emotions in my songs when those emotions were in the abstract (that is to say, when I did not actually feel the emotions myself, but only pretended to for the sake of writing a song about them), but now that I am actually caught up in the torrent of emotion that only comes with the knowledge that the end is near, I simply cannot put those feelings into music.

Phaw! Thinking about my music now always pangs me, and not just because I can no longer write. Oh, that I could sing again!

. . .

Am I right to hesitate? Do I dare hark back to the days when my band mates and I thrilled audiences the world over with our energy, our grandiose showmanship? When we filled every venue, from taverns to auditoriums, to the grand Jidoor Opera House itself? Why should I recall those times now? I have long since become too sick to perform live concerts, and more recently it has even become impossible for me to record record albums. I know that the memories of days when I could do those things will only bring about deeper sorrow than already rends my soul. And it is especially hard, with the knowledge that I brought it upon myself, in a way. I was a completely unwitting victim of the virus—it is a relatively new disease, from what I understand; I had never even heard of it before I contracted it, and even the 'experts' don't know much about it.

Perhaps if I could put pen to paper, record my experiences, so that some other poor fool might be spared my corrupted lot. . . . But there lies my pen on the tiled floor, out of my reach. I might have the energy to rise and retrieve it, but what would the point be? Would I not become confounded, all the more upset? Wallowing in self-pity as I do (and I freely admit that this is so, but cannot do a thing about it), how would I fare? After all, how can a man hope to compose memoirs if he cannot even think of a good rhyme for the word "mine" in a song? Well, besides the obvious ones; nine, fine, line, dine, pine. . . . And how can I hope to write anything at all when I am deprived of the ability to properly throw my pen? For surely an author has the right to throw his pen against a wall in frustration. It is a right he must have, to preserve his sanity.

Preserve it for what?

Hmm. A dreary thought, no? I am growing used to them. As of late, they are all that fill my mind.

Well. If I must lay here, a living corpse in a cadaverous world, with a head full of dreary thoughts, I deserve to have a little satisfaction along with them, I think. Yes, remembering those old times would be satisfying, if ultimately painful.

Oh well. I can stand a bit more pain.

Do I dare lose myself in my memories? Will I ever find my way back to my life?

Such as it is, do I want to?

My mind wanders, as if adrift on a wind which blows the covering of dust from pictures in my mind that have not been seen for much too long. I see the images of my life, and I think back on them. Some I think on fondly, others . . . not so fondly. But I continue to move backward in time, and more images flash through my mind.

I remember in every detail the office of the doctor who told me that I was sick. I recall the inflection of his voice; he delivered the news as if I were a small child who required the greatest and gentlest care, rather than a man who could handle bad tidings.

Too painful a memory. I think back further. I can see and hear the roaring crowds at our first concert at the Jidoor Opera House.

A musician knows he's made it when he plays the Opera House.

But I don't stay there. I move back further yet, to one of our many concerts for drunkards in a small town tavern. Still further back, to when I first met my future band mates at the university. So I finally arrived at the beginning of my story.

No . . . no, I haven't. No, I must go back to the very beginning's beginning, to when the seeds of my music were planted. By a mother, and a piano, in the coastal city of South Figaro.

There is where my tale begins. . . .

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