When I was a child, there was a song the farmers would sing during harvest season. Its lyrics were like liquor on the workers' tongues, satiating their narrowly-repressed need for expression, for distraction from the season's monotonous ministrations. Each syllable was a rallying cry, a metronome to keep time with the practiced reaping of Mother Nature's gifts. With a child's eager ears and little lungs desperate to bellow, I sponged up the tune and it became a twin heartbeat inside my chest. If I was in the fields, I was singing along with the workers that treated me like their own. If I was down by the rivers, scrubbing dirt and oil from my arms, I was humming the chords in time with each rinse. If I was in the manor–no, it was best not to ruminate on my time there.
The song goes as follows:
This word is cru-el
To the people that it loves
Angels to demons and
Sudden flightless doves
It plucks them from the sky
In-king white feathered quills
Soiling sacred ground
Reaped for mere, cheap thrills
The sun watches as the fields
Carry seeds without water
Ob-serves as they grow
Nursing cries, from each daughter
The farmers pluck the blackness
Sprouted from the trees
Ignore the bloody juices
And the bitten-back pleas
Then to the hunters go the farmers
Protecting olives with their guns
Shooing down the doves
All while bas-king in the sun
Because this world knows no love
Can give none at all
Snapping peace branches in two
And letting fliers fall
My mother always said the farmers had a penchant for the nihilistic; for a long time, I rationalized that the song was her only reason for accusing the hired hands of their pessimism. I did not understand what it meant to live a life that demanded such a worldview; not then. Not while I lived in the tender embrace of blissful, childhood innocence.
I cannot say the same now.
I think back on the song from my past only because there is a strange comfort in likening myself to those doves, to the creatures of the sky that once flew so unlimbered by human philosophy and mortal reality. The avian species, most noble of them all, free to explore the skies to their hearts' content!
That is, of course, until they're shot.
I can still feel the sharp burn of the shrapnel burrowing into my flesh. I can still taste the olive oil staining my hands, staining my being, staining my toned chest now riddled with shotgun spray. My consciousness is fading, drooping like autumn leaves as they sag under the weight of their own self-destruction.
Did you know that the trees decide when to kill their leaves off? The seasons are a large influence, yes, but it is the tree itself that takes back its nutrients and disconnects the leaves when their presence threatens to siphon off necessary nutrients from the trunk and the roots.
Oh, Mother.
I am dying; of that I am now sure. When else would her voice return to me, except in those final fleeting moments all mortals are allegedly promised? Those split seconds spent in the liminal space between life and eternal unconsciousness?
I think, suddenly, that I did not live a good life.
I am angry.
The birds did not deserve to die; neither do I.
But I cannot seem to crawl away from the abyss that has started to percolate into the outermost corners of my awareness. Is it too trite to say that the world is going dark? Oh, but there is light, and it is the light of the mid-summer sky, that harkening blue horizon stretched on and on like a prize I've spent a lifetime taking for granted.
What I wouldn't give, for one more day under its banner.
The song plays over in my head. It is my death mantra, the auditory obituary that will follow me into nonexistence. If there is another person alive to sing it after I am gone, I do not know of their existence. For so long now I have been sleeping next to its stanzas, embracing its overtures like a forlorn lover, an apologetic, absent friend.
In my head I am nearing the last lines.
My voice–why, I wonder, is it that voice of innocence back again to sing these words?–caresses those lingering syllables, those heavy-hearted pieces of the hymn I learned so long ago. Her voice fades into oblivion, and I know that this is the moment I am supposed to go with her. This is the part where I become death become dirt become dust. The way back to the life I lived is long gone, a forest path etched over in moss and lichen. No longer a stone's throw from the manor that birthed and burned me.
But there is something else, here, too, and it is not exactly like a second breath or a second birth. More like a second heartbeat. A second beat of battered, broken wings. It is not oblivion, though I can still feel that distinctive pull, too, attempting to coax me around this peculiar fluctuation of my death throes. But I am not quite ready to give in yet. This anomaly does not quite feel like life–but it does not quite feel like death, either, and I am not yet greedy to know her taste.
I suppose I am my mother's daughter, after all.
So I adjust. I reach. I yearn, in a way that I am not quite sure I've yearned for anything in my entire life before.
We make contact, this abstraction and I, and I learn its name the very second I feel my lungs flare and my eyes twitch. I can smell the forest–petrichor and wind, pine and water–and I can feel the air against my cheeks. My fingers twitch. They move, like sailors exploring new seas, over the crashing waves of my rising and falling chest. No shrapnel impedes their voyage; no blood deters their search. I am breathing. I am without wounds.
And I am alive.
I open my eyes. A blue sky unfurls itself above me, filtered through the leafy green canopy peering down at my person. I can hear birdsong to my left. Trickling water to my right. Cushy grass sprawls out around me, a veritable bed of lush greenery, and it is only when I sit up to adjust that I understand in full what my peculiar acquaintance in my dying moments has done.
For I am not as I once was.
My feet are clad in dull leather boots, the kind that've seen many miles and many months. I've complimented them with lighter pants. A blue linen shirt. And my skin has changed, too: my nails are longer now, healthier without rummaging around coarse trunks. I've no calluses on the pads of my fingers from working the presses. No defined muscles on my arms from climbing olive trees. I think again of the trickling water to my right and imagine that I can use it to see my reflection, to understand what, exactly, I have become, and as I turn my head–
Ah; there it is. The apotheosis I've been anticipating.
Beyond the tree line lies a structure no grander than the buildings that threatened to carve out their own place against the skyline. It is no grander than the way the olive orchards seemed to me when I was just a baby. But I know that structure. I know its significance.
It is a wall, and it is as real to me now as my once-world was before I was shot.
I understand, then, that what I have been given–this peculiar reinstation of life–is a second chance. Someone has died and I have stepped in to occupy their place. Have they occupied mine? Or did they follow the call of the void? It does not matter, not in the way this cruel interpretation of a salvation does. Hadn't I just finished declaring that I would give anything, would pay any price, for but one more day under a blue sky?
If I am where I suspect to be, then perhaps one day is all I will truly get.
A memory returns to me, of a summer day not entirely dissimilar to this one, when I'd finished up in the fields. I'd returned to the manor to find it pleasantly empty. The television set in the solar dark until I approached it. In the memory I sat back in my favorite chair, pulled up the show I'd nearly finished, and started the next episode. I'd watched the walls looming before me come down. I'd watched the creatures spew from the defensive structure's innards like bats out a cave.
Yet the walls before me–the real ones, not the ones I'd seen in boisterous strokes of digital artistry–still stood.
Shingeki no Kyojin. Attack on Titan. A stellarly popular show framed in an expensive television set housed in the home I'd known for nearly all my life. A second chance. A new body, new world, new timeframe.
I think of the doves and remember my anger, my frustration at living a life I was bound to regret. The second I saw the barrel of the shotgun pointed my way I'd understood all the ways in which I'd been doomed. I'd been written off from the start, destined to die, to fall and strike the ground before my body could even cool. Truly, I was no better off here. I was the daughter of an olive tycoon and her miserable, jaded husband–what chance did I stand here, of all places, in the thin spattering of trees just outside of Eldia's unbroken walls?
Wait.
Unbroken.
What do you think would've happened, had the walls never been breached?
A silly question from a simple-minded childhood friend. I remembered shrugging it off, saying some flippant answer back about how there wouldn't be a show if that was the case.
But what if that was the answer? What if that was exactly what my second chance demanded? No show, no attempted invasion, no rumbling. No decimation of the island I now lived and breathed on. If the walls held, I would live. I could remake myself: be anyone, be anything. The idea was intoxicating. When had I ever been able to step out of the shadow of my parents' legacy? When had I ever shed my name and all its implications?
Here, I could be free–if I played my cards right. If I could stop the unstoppable. I think back on the devastation of the show's final season. I remember puzzling the ethical conundrums over in my head while I waited for new episodes to drop, trying to wrestle one solution out from under the show's careful plotting. I tried to defy the system by way of my wits. I tried to discover a different solution, a better one, something that the clever cast hadn't considered. Something that'd never once occurred to them in all those years of desperate plotting to avoid conflict between Eldia and the rest of the world. But there was no way to stop any of that, was there? If the past and the future are already acting on the world and shaping its course, is there anything I can do to stop that?
Perhaps there is.
I have lived and died in a world with a different frame of understanding in regards to this show. It stands to reason that there is a past, present and future that is shaping this world as was intended originally. It also stands to reason that I am not bound to that sway, simply for the sheer fact that I have my memories.
I stand up slowly, using the tree to help me rise. This body is not mine, but I will adjust. I will learn its aches and its strengths. It will become a vessel through which I will get a second chance. A culmination of all my fledgling hopes and dreams. I want to survive. I want to try again, and this time for myself.
I want to live: and if I must rewrite the future itself to do so–if I must undo all that I'd once witnessed–then so be it.