In 2034, the world went darker and duller. Literally, because the earth reflected less and less sunlight. It wasn't glowing nearly as bright any more as 40 years before.
To be honest, I was scared when I read about it. Scared, when the usually well stocked shelves in the remaining supermarkets ran out of vegetables and fruits, out of pasta and tinned food. A few months later, there would be nothing left at all.
I was scared, when half the stores forever closed their doors, and even more scared I was of the menacing threats with which strangers started saluting each other on the streets. Scared of secret whispers, which crept up and down the allies at night, and what scared me most was the future, the mere idea of which became uncertain.
Although he meant well, Michael's optimism started to upset me. It was as if he were trying to drown out the dark drums in my head with the inconspicious, but uplifting music you would hear on an elevator.
"Brighten up, it won't be that bad, we shouldn't get too worried."
Faced with an optimist, a realist turns into a pessimist just as easily as an optimist becomes a blind ignoramus in the face of realism. With what I considered his ignorance in my ears, I felt belittled. It was like he refused to take me seriously. Deep inside me, the fear of everything that was to come kept seething. Until I found something to calm me down.
Clare. At the time, she was 45 years old. A single mother from the worst part of town, where not even the grass brought itself to hold its head up, but drooped between empty bottles and abandoned houses.
The sad looking meadows, the sick looking misfits, and the plain concrete of the housing blocks were not her original home. Quite the opposite, in fact. She used to live on the opposite side of town. Only in recent times, she had ended up here, after her child - a small son - had unexpectedly died. She would never talk about what had happened to him. I can only assume that, after the tragedy, she was never the same again.
I'm not quite sure what drew her to me. My fear of the deteriorating world, perhaps, or my undisclosed desire for somebody who could show me a way. Back then, at least, it seemed like she had a plan and would be able to lead those who couldn´t guide themselves. People like me.
It was midday, warm and debilitating, when her resolute voice found me on my daily walkabout. I was out against restrictions. At the time, we were locked down to save what we threatened daily with our bare breath, the world around us and everything in it. When our doors would open again, or if they even ever would, was uncertain, just like it had been the many times it had happened before this day.
Even when everything was re-opening, some didn't leave their houses any more those days. They were afraid of the air, as if it were gas, and of sun rays, as if they were laser beams, due to radio voices that kept on warning us about both of it. Every five minuted we were encouraged to check our carbon footprints which were constantly calculated, and grew with every breath, every bite of food we took, and every light we turned on in our houses.
Whatever we bought, and whatever we did, reduced the allowance that we received on our implemented watches once a week. It was just enough, so we would survive, but not even nearly enough to allow us an actual life. Only if we stayed at home all day, we did not have to expect deductions for breathing itself. Every interior was equipped with carbon converters, plants and tiny colonies of bacteria that could metabolise CO2. Despite them, my watch was low, when I encountered Clare on my unauthorised tour during a seemingly never-ending lockdown that was caused by the climate crisis. Usually I wouldn´t meet a soul, and when I did, it would nearly frighten me. Too big was the risk that a stranger could report me. However, when Clare's voice reached me that day, I wasn't scared, but as calm as I hadn't felt in years.
By God, she could talk! In an instant, the confidence in her words grabbed me and pulled me around the corner, where I saw her standing on pallets. She was surrounded by a crowd of people who, like me, were looking for direction.
"If you don't act now, you are to blame! The family father in the first row, look at me! You will be to blame for your children's detoriating future, just as the rebellious looking lady covered in tattoos to my left will make herself guilty of the murdering freedom. And to my right, the well situated woman with peace symbols on her shirt, you will be to blame for civil wars on the streets."
Her voice was firm and deft, when she turned to me and addressed me.
"You, the youngster who just arrived and stands at the crossroads back there, with his head bowed, and the arms crossed! What happens scares you, I know, but all of us are asking you to not let it cripple you, because we need you, if we want to defeat what you are scared of. Anyone who is scared and waiting now, doing nothing at all, is approving everything that scares them and will eventually become what they are scared of the most. Would you be able to live with that, young one? Or will you help us to take control, so we can return to our lives in a prosperous community, the next generations pf which won't have to be afraid?"
She knew well what she was doing, and was knowledgeable enough to understand how to get others where she needed them. At the time, her movement was big enough. When I joined it, I met Sarah, Sandra, and Robert, all of whom were to become essential parts of my own group. Each of them had their own reasons to associate with Clare's community and everyone had their own tasks within it.
Sarah, a free spirit, was rebellious and constantly questioning why others were doing what they were doing. Sometimes she was exhausting, she would never just follow what she was being told. Something inside her drew her to break the rules, and the group would accept it, because by overturning what the community had built, she would often expose flaws in the system and improve it.
There Sandra would come in. The two of them were like inseparable twins, one didn´t work without the other. Sarah would rip things apart, and Sandra would put them back together to create something of value. Whenever she had a vision, she dedicated every bit of her being to it, no matter how much time it took to bring it to life. To be honest, in most cases she would take more time than any of us could wait for. She wouldn't stop until she would have reached perfection, but things can never become perfect, and to remind her of it, she desperately needed Robert.
Bored of everything within minutes, he would only spend as much time with things as his knee wouldn't start trembling and his eyes wouldn't wander in search of something new. He used to be of money, used to have everything it can buy, but none of it had sufficed to satisfy his hunger for life. When I first spoke to him, I asked him who he was.
"Is anyone ever sure of that?" He asked me a counter-question. "And if they are, doesn't that make their life incredibly hard to endure?"
Little did he know then that he was talking to someone who thought to know exactly who he was. Plain, compared to everyone else. Just someone, an everyman. Even so, I didn't find my life hard to endure at this very point in time. Now, however, since I have discovered that I never knew who I was going to become.
After I joined Clare's movement, something started happening to me. Something huge; I was changing. What Clare was aiming for back then, was separation. She wanted to build an own, secluded world, which would make it through the riots and revolts that she kept on predicting.
Briefly after I joined them, her predictions turned into more than that. They were starting to come true. A self-fulfilling prophecy, perhaps. All of a sudden, the world around us was a drunkenly driven car that, speeding and fishtailing, would almost certainly overturn at the next bend in the road. Society destabilised and divided. The supply situation deteriorated, and suddenly everyone was all alone. We were abandoned.
I tried my best to keep on socialising. In the weeks to come, I introduced Michael to Clare, and briefly afterwards, he invited two of his friends to come along, James and Will, who were both looking to connect with likeminded people.
Will was a carer, who had spent his youth looking after his sick sister. Before the vaccinations had begun, she had died, and so had his purpose. Everything that he had ever done was aimed at helping others. A saint in a demonic world that would keep on taking from him, without ever giving him anything back. Like his last girlfriend had done it, a single mother of three, who had selfishly asked him for money. He had gotten himself into debt for her, and she had never paid him back, but left him, instead.
"Don't you regret any of it?" I asked him when I found out.
There he laughed at me, shaking his head.
"I didn't expect anything in return. I did what I did, because I wanted to do it. Look at it this way, if I hadn't done it, I wouldn't have been able to live with myself."
A martyr of selflessness, who had known James since preschool. Growing up together, they had been shaping each other's world. Like Will, James was committed to doing things for others, but for slightly different reasons.
He did what he did in order to please and appease them, since he cared just a bit too much about how the world would saw him. He had spent his childhood in a family of eight, where love, as if it were limited, had been fought for just as hard as delicious piece of cake. At 16, he had gone to jail for something that his brother had done, in the hopes that it would earn him a place at home. What he had received in return had been the opposite, a feeling of not being appreciated. To this day, I remember a conversation I once had with him.
"Did you do all of this?" I asked, referring to the wood he had chopped, the snow he had cleared, and the birds he had shot and gutted for us overnight.
He gave me a nod, the eyes as bright as day.
When I asked him for the reason why, he replied, "Why would anyone keep something that isn't useful?"
When he spoke, he made you feel like you were the only person on earth, appreciated, thanked for, and really seen. Soon enough every single one of us would need exactly that.