I found the two-headed baby deer dying on a bed of soft pine needles under cover of an overturned oak not five kilometres from my cottage. Its lungs still pumped, and its crimson heart beat weakly through a thin, translucent skin that decayed before my eyes until there was no skin and all the organs lay warm and still in a heap upon the earth like waste.
A god evaporated.
It is human nature to disbelieve that one may be witness to epochal events, so I did not believe that I, of all people, should be witness to the death of time.
Epochal: the concept itself is dead.
How lucky we were to know time at its cleanest and most linear!
We know now that such constant linearity was the consequence of a living entity. It followed the creature like stench follows a skunk, and we basked in it as if it was the natural state of the world.
No more.
Time no longer heals. Things do not pass, or pass only to return.
At first we believed this would be manageable. Yes, we thought, we will relive our pain but also our love. Everything shall be magnified! Welcome to an age of great emotions, a new Romanticism!
Yet we overestimated how much we help. We failed to accept how much we hurt.
And we did not realize the nature of evil, which accumulates in a way love does not. To re-experience our love is to know it again and again at the same intensity, but to re-experience pain is to increase its volume until it overpowers us, deafening us to everything else.
I will never forget the creature’s eyes, full of hatred or hubris yet seeking aid it knew I could not give.
How does one save a dying god?
It was not my fault!
I was but a child asked suddenly to solve a deathbed equation expressed in an undiscovered mathematics. I had to fail, yet in failing I have brought it all upon us.
I relive it constantly.
Every time its eyes are louder.
But it is the hour for my afternoon walk, so I will take a pause and enjoy what remains of living.
I will go to my favourite spot overlooking the city and sit on the iron bench, from where the view is magnificent. Above me, the clouds will form, a tangle of pain and human corpses, and I will sit and ponder until the first blood drops fall. Then the screaming will begin and the final storm will rage. Beating, crimson corpse-clouds under a thin skin of dissipating reality, raining blood until we are left warm and still upon the earth…