Fair-weather Friend

by B. York
March 14th, 2006

We finally did it. For centuries philosophers both of science and religion wondered how much it would take to push ourselves to the brink. They hypothesized and prayed to what end man would come if they kept pushing the limits. All of the wars fought, the corruption broadcast and the sin rampant in environment and in our everyday lives could never have awoken us to the simple truth that we had been sliding down this inverted mountain since the day an ape chose a stick over its bare hands.

They wanted to know what would happen if we continued along our ways. Today they got their answer.

I was what you would call a believer in nothing. Nihilism wasn’t my game it was the mark of atheism that took me by its reigns. Being an atheist wasn’t my problem. Not thinking that there was something right in front of us that we’d all been missing that was. When I woke up today I didn’t question why things were different I just knew that they were.

Even when I walked outside I knew that something was missing more than the obvious and I felt cold and dim. The news yesterday had announced how many had died from the nuclear affair in the east and how many more had been killed in the name of having the almighty on ones side. Truly, I never thought that our time would be the last straw.

Everyone did the same thing upon waking up. Hell, I did it too. We all checked our clocks, we looked at the date and we tried to come to grips that we weren’t crazy. No, I knew it was more than just a lost point in our daily lives that was gone. I stepped outside and I didn’t have a shadow anymore. No one had shadows anymore.

The news didn’t come on today and I knew it was because they felt the same as I did. You wake up; you expect it to be there to greet you. It was right in front of us and we had it right a long time ago but science made it like unto a fairy tale.

All of us woke up today and found that the sun was gone. It didn’t explode and it didn’t fizz out. It left. The warmth that was lost was more than just from the heat the rays gave us. We felt empty inside, we felt cold in a way that not even electric heaters turned on high could fix. The wars might stop, they might not. Something gave up on us today and it left because we were beyond hope. I have to wake up tomorrow knowing I am hopeless; knowing this world is lost.

I woke up today and walked outside to a world with no sun and no warmth. I looked on the ground and saw that I had no shadow. No one had shadows anymore. We were the shadows now.