Walking into the classroom of my new elementary school, I fixed my gaze onto the single beacon in a whole room, which rested on my new teachers palm. It was a small candle whose flame brought into light the nonchalant demeanor of my instructor's face. As the class streamed in there were murmurs of confusion and excitement, and soon as we quieted down our teacher chided onto us to make observations about the candle.
“But, remember,” the teacher added on,”that observations are the things you observe empirically. Inferences are the things you conclude… and inferences can be wrong.”
We stared at him, wary now. At last, one brave voice retorted that the flame was yellow. Then students piled their inspections on each other: The flame is burning, the wick is burning, the wax is cylindrical. Then, he shrugged and proceeded to swallow the candle. Once he swallowed he retorted that it was mediocre he shrugged once more.
"If there's one thing I want you to learn in this class, it's the first rule of scientific thinking: never assume that your mind can’t lie to you, a visual, sensory, or even white."
A fierce rattle snapped us out of our lesson, and I spotted a huge wave sprouting out of clouds that wrapped the sky and descended a fog to wrap the streets below. I could see the whole of Gearhart cutting into an invisible ocean, an ocean that would soon become a reality.
As my class started to evacuate I watched a wall of water gallop over the top of stores, them curl back onto itself and clash below on the hindsight of the buildings. As it snuck back it washed with it all traces of its manifestation. It picked the structures up and swept it to an abyss.
My teacher tugged on me to join but I was imbolized. There was a certain idyllic sense about the slow ride of destruction that had corded a bond and sprouted sensations of fervor had sparked to life when prolonging tremor and infecting others.
I obliged, strolling down to the passing where straight shafts of trees stood against the sudden, magnificent spread of the great beyond all embodied in the single object of the wave’s great stride. I wondered why I wanted to run, not up to safety, I wouldn’t dare to disrupt the memory of this je ne sais quoi moment, but through that forest, dim and cool, to the abyss.
I was puzzled why I was so aware of my body’s process of walking, of movement, of enjoyment. And as I finally reached the ridge I etched my brain trying to find the source of my enjoyment to the sight even though I never paid heed to the country around me.
Looking out into the horizon the same speck of fear was scarred on each of my peer’s faces, in contrast to mine, in awe of the fleeting moment. But one thing was for sure, this chain would both smash and soothe our souls like nothing ever before.
I found a hole that was conceived deep in the opposite side of the beach to sneak into a deep cave and ushered the only three peers I could find. While stuck in this land of apathy I turned my newfound strayed attention in the state of gloom and doom into vigilance.
In a single blast of emotion, I felt stuck in a house with a fire in it, without any way to call the fire department. Just the top window to look out of while my fallacy catched up to me.
There was a peculiar stillness surrounding me, It felt like an impossible attempt to a living image of the non-existent. There were no attributes of reality to perceive, nothing but their absence; no sound, as if I were alone in the cave- no motion as if this were not a cave but an inanimate room in a building- no light as if it were neither but simply space- no violence as if we were in a realm where prejudice couldn’t exist. Apathy turned into anger, transforming into frustration. Wouldn’t it be better if I went to the storm right? Dead has to beat calamity surely?
L'appel du vide. The call of the void. The urge to self destruct rose as I climbed back up.
The four of us stood at the top of the hill, starstruck, gaping down at the vast wreckage while the wave slid back, taking pieces of numerous buildings and the plebeians who had been near them. It looked like the rudder of a sinking ship; a few tall buildings still rose above it but the rest was engulfed below blue-gray helix slowly dissipating into a field of vapor and space.
The carnage seems to whisper the words Au Revoir! Till we meet again! As if taunting me with the curse that since I had escaped my fate once, my eradication will be my soul stalker to my kismet- my destiny and fate. We were anachronisms of a history repeated.
This was how they had gones- I thought- Atlantis, the mighty city that capsized into the sea, and all the other empires that had vanished without any trace but annihilation. They had all left the same legend in the languages of men, as well as the same longing.
It was a shower, I told myself, reasoning it as a white lie, except instead of wiping away dirt, grime, and dust, it was a cleanse of the product of mind, to start anew.
But there was something bothering me in the back of my mind. The basis that there were no white lies, no lies that could lessen their vice, but rather only the blackness of destruction. And a white lie, as it turns out, is blackest of them all.
