Alone Without Truth
“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” George Orwell
Truth, I can’t forget you. You were so real, so solid and dependable. Also, you were beautiful. So uncompromising the way you stood there and we wrapped and draped our experience around you, moving while you were still. You were the skeleton, without which, our shape and structure and volition could not exist. You defined us. You gave us a center to return to. Even when we turned on our heels and extended our division to the very limits of binary opposition, you gave us a way back to each other, and ourselves.
But, only if we all agreed on who and what you are, and that you are.
Now nothing holds us together, the fine thread of the continuum has shred into a few solitary wisps, memories of meeting, floating desolate across an unbridgeable chasm. And we stand today on either side, arms raised, fists clenched, no longer connected through a shared narrative called truth, no way to walk toward one another, to get close enough to recognize ourselves in each other.
I cannot explain the hollow loneliness there is without you, what the world looks like. The sheer isolation tears at the memory of the membrane of truth that connected us. Now even if we translate our sounds into a common pattern, a common language, we cannot understand each other. The holy grail of truth has been hurled into the roaring silence beyond our tiny world.
We are left behind, alone together, without you, without each other.
I have always loved you truth, always clung to you; the one thing unchangeable in a fickle world. You had the alchemical authority to transcend and such an evolution of nuanced dimension. Who would have thought you so fragile?
When truth leaves, spinning off into dark space, death finds us, without the comfort of immortality. Discordance jangles at the lost harmony in the sound of us. Every note fights to be the only one. What moved us towards each other has been removed and in the emptiness an invader grows that cares nothing for the patterned order of our communion.
I cannot be impartial to you, truth. I cannot manufacture you with my affection either. We cannot, through partial agreement, conjure you. We let you escape, we shared you with people who did not recognize or respect you. We gave you to those who thought you expendable, who saw you as competition. They were suicidal without knowing it. They persist briefly still, not fearing obliteration, not feeling the end in the clammy, cold air whistling hungry down the tunnel to claim them.
But, when it arrives, this end, it will not take the time to sort through believers and non-believers. It will swallow us all. In one furious gulp.
When truth left us, life did too. Now we need a hero. Now we need all to be heroes. Now we must tramp across the hills and plains, beyond the boundaries of our skies, across the shrouded black silence. We must wear our feet raw, for we must find you, our only hope of a story without end. You define our infinity. Truth is life, we simply cannot afford to lose it.