I'll have more stuff ready for tomorrow, cause Saturday's are free of me having to do important stuff and have much more opportunity than weekdays provide. Anyways, enjoy, seeya tomorrow, and hope your day is off to a nice start from this. Unless you read this at a later time or date, in which case just have a pleasant time in general.
Joan and Mark by Mackinley Clevinger, August 9, 2015
“Joan, do you ever… do you ever get the feeling that we’ve… I don’t know. Missed out on something? A life we should’ve lived, should’ve been able to have. Something better than this?” Mark lifted his shovel from the rubble, sweeping it towards a ragged tear in the side of the squat concrete office building he stood within. Joan looked up from the aged maps laid out on a recently righted table and swept her gaze through the cracked-concrete lined hole in the wall, and sighed.
“Like a normal life’s just passed us by? We had our chance, and it was taken away from us?” Joan heaved herself away from the maps and stretched, her spine popping and cracking as she worked the kinks out. “I feel like that every time I stop and think, Mark. I feel like we wake up to something bleaker and worse every morning, I think of the old days and I just can’t always stop the tears from coming.”
Joan laid her hands on the back of Mark’s shoulders and looked over him towards a view topped with a dismal grey. “I think of the family I’ve left behind, Mark, and it’s a thought that tears me up inside. All I want to do is give up, let myself drown in the fear and the pain.” Joan let her head drop, her forehead pressed against the back of Mark’s head, and let out a shaky breath.
“How do you…” Mark coughed and spat a dust infused wad of spit into the mess of rock and debris at his feet. “How do you… not… drown in it all. In the loss and the pain and knowing that things could’ve been different? That maybe… maybe it didn’t have to be this bad? For any of us?” Mark wiped at his eyes, leaving a wet stain on the dust caked around his eyes.
“By remembering that what’s happened is done, Mark. You can’t change what you did, you can’t change what someone else did, it’s done. We have the lot in life that we do, and nothing’s going to change that but how we walk forward.” Joan lifted her head and looked at the ruins surrounding her, the ravaged remains of a once proud building long turned to ruin. She looked down at the area of cleared debris, the culmination of several day’s effort and too many spent supplies.
“The past is gone to us and the present is fleeting, all we’ve got to look forward to now is the future. A better future, one we can be proud of.” Joan took a step back from Mark and bent down, looking at the scattered rocks and imagining what may be beneath. “It does us no good to dwell on our regrets, all of our mistakes, or what could’ve been. Bottle up your past for better days, and keep yourself focused on what’s important.”
Mark let his shovel fall and turned towards Joan. “So none of it matters? Our families, our friends… the dead? They don’t matter, just keep on living? Shut out our past? Give up on our lives? Just…” Mark looked back through the tear in the side of the building. “Give up on hope that we’ll ever get back what we lost, and treat it as unimportant? That’s what you want me to do? Just… let the past die, like the world did?” Mark’s eyes darted over the streets, covered in rubble that obscured rusted and shredded metal that were once cars, over collapsed structures that were once buildings, and at the bodies that were once living people.
“Joan, I don’t want to give up on that, no matter how much it hurts. I don’t care what happened, I don’t care who did it, I just want what the world used to be to be that again. I don’t want some abomination to take its place, I want my life back.” Mark stood staring over the decrepit city while Joan sifted through the rubble.
“We’ll get there one day, Mark.”