Atgal

Schneider Jamie


The Rapture

Among many things stuffed inside my tattered, foul old rucksack, my delicate handmade radio is the most imperative of the lot, strung together with barbed wire and duct tape half the time I’m glueing it back into one piece, and last week it started to talk again. If I had a pedometer the numbers would be ticking off the screen. I've walked from Switzerland to France eagerly following this mysterious voice that beckons me over the radio “Find Old Monaco, I’ll be there”, and there it is again, blasting through the speakerphone.

 

I only have my voice, whether it be in my head or spoken out, I know that nothing and no one will ever respond, yet I try to remain positive, it’s good for the sanity. There are so many places that I wish I could’ve seen before the rapture, Mount Everest, Tokyo, the Grand Canyon, the Hulunbuir, yet now more than ever the world seems so much more vast than it used to; oceans swallow this planet whole, when before they only seemed to be a short flight. I would do a great many of things to be in an aeroplane again, watch the world from so high up, feel like I could touch the clou… “Find Old Monaco, I’ll be there”. Like an old friend, that wretched voice impedes my restless thoughts once again.

 

I do envy the times when modern engineering gave so many simple pleasures, out of all the items I wish I could find, one would be a pop-up tent. It’s been four years now and I’ve set up a tent every night for a good three of them, but out of all the things I’ve found, why not a pop-up tent? Four years of this. Four. Restless. Endless. Years. No TV, Internet or even people to talk to, and I deign not read another book. My baleful insight is my greatest enemy, yet it is also my closest friend, it is the only thing that brings me that bitter-sweet company.

 

I never went to Monaco, too pishposh for my liking. Whilst Niki Lauda was racing round in his Formula 1 car, and stuck-up rich guys were eating out at Nobu, I was back at home enjoying the simple pleasures of life. Making trillions and blowing it all on fancy dinners was never my lifestyle ideal, perhaps I just have a twisted vision due to all the YouTube I used to watch, gosh, YouTube, I haven’t said that in a while, then again neither has anyone.

 

For all I know, if there isn’t another person on the other side of this radio, and instead it’s just a record on repeat, I may very well be the last of my race, I may be the last of 200,000 years of evolution to this very moment, hundreds of billions of ancestors are watching me right now, judging my every move. I must appease them.

 

“Find Old Monaco, I’ll be there”. “Find Old Monaco, I’ll be there”. “Find Old Monaco, I’ll be there”. How I yearn, whoever took the world from me, hear me, I yearn, I yearn this isn’t another cruel trick, I yearn there is another on the other side of this radio, I yearn. Perhaps this, my endless punishment will be my undoing, will be humanities undoing. A tragic blissful end to a short and sweet lifeform, it feels suspiciously funny. Wherever nothingness may be, whether it’s already found me, I can be sure, it won’t be far behind, thus I must keep moving. 


 




Pateikta: 10:18 Fri, 22 March 2024 by : Schneider Jamie age : 15