THE PRICE OF PEACE IS ONLY A FEW BILLION DOLLARS

THE PRICE OF PEACE IS ONLY A FEW BILLION DOLLARS

There is an infuriating silence that fills the void of your thoughts when you emerge into the excruciating realization that the world you thought you knew, never really was. I remember the sweet surrender of the velvet sky to the illuminated brilliance of city skyscrapers one somber summer night. I remember the wet kiss of the evening breeze as I hurriedly counted my money to purchase a remedy to my parched throat. It was my last five-dollar bill spent on a cold bottle of water. My hands shook with such intensity that my newly purchased Poland Spring water slipped right through my fingers after my first few gulps of water.

I’m out of money.

I’ve been running in circles since the dawn of the morning. It’s almost midnight now. I am convinced that the shadows of fiery hell continue to crawl towards me. To drag me. I don’t see them, I feel them. Like the breath of a furnace. You may not see them, but I feel them! I know they are here! These newcomers. Yet the rest of the world is desperate to live in utter normalcy, pointing at me, laughing at me. As if I’ve lost my mind.

Voiceless. The exuberance of darkness continues to overshadow the deepest, most harrowing screams sealed beneath the mutinies of this waking life. My sincerest attempt to embrace the wreath of salvation, buoyed by the tragic wallows of this soul, yearning for emancipation beyond the weight of erasure. This vessel, my body, which I always believed to be my own, was overtaken by a foreign consciousness, creating a version of myself, more presentable to the world. A caricature of myself. Lulled briefly into my true self through the silence of weeping. Peace, I beg you, swallow me in my entirety! Douse the embers of this unceasing pain! Buoy me into an eternal slumber of death, bring me freedom from the demons that haunt my restless soul!

Just a few more years until our mission is complete. They will not kill me, I must kill myself. 

Social engineering the human race to adapt to our intergalactic reality was a centennial achievement. In a few hours we will honor the victors among humanity. We’ve proven a capacity to showcase normalcy in the midst of internal darkness. They don’t live among us, they live within us. We were forced to accommodate a series consciousness modeled in accordance to the most vile beings that have existed in this universe. For three years, I was trapped inside my own body, negotiating the value of my life with the harem of cosmic torturers, the current forebears of our new Great Society. 

Their tasty experiment.

To explain the riddles of reality and our relations to the grip of human sorrow is a nonsensical endeavor when your mind rebels against your desperate desire for sanity and death (in no particular order). Up until this point in my life, I never questioned the coherence of my mind and soul, I never conceptualized the possibility that a discord between these two could ever threaten my ability to reason and view the world with coherent normalcy. For those three years, it felt like my mind was imprisoned by the wretched depths of my soul. My soul was replaced by a heavy shadow, a pill of darkness forcefully cultivating its wrath in the crevices and deep pockets of my soulless existence.

It took ten years for them to tell us it was just a war.

Most people encounter the future, but in my case, this future encountered me, and forcefully submitted my will to its glory. Never did I understand the reason for my predicament, nor was I ever offered the opportunity to do so. There’s no anger left within me to inquire about the design of the multiyear recruitment. I just kept running.

I kept running away from a shadow that was not really even there. I nervously listened to the erratic beating of my heart as my panicked breathing created broken symphonies of hopeless mania, spinning me into the merciless cycle of hellish confusion. Three years. For three years I lived in a perpetual state of silent confusion, steeply marinated with a darkness I could never explain, a darkness that infected every pore of my being, every dream, every waking moment, swallowed whole by a nefarious, vicious, ugly ghost, persisting, always. So much so, that my mere existence in the reality I called my own, was cosmic entertainment for higher beings beyond my worldly understanding of human existence.

My soul was their playground.

Sleep was a luxury. For three years they kept me awake, ruminating in gory thoughts that were never my own. Controlling every aspect of the soul that I believed was my own. Until that dimly lit summer night when my innocence was taken away from me. Forever. There are times when tears no longer served its intended purpose. My mother used to always tell me it was okay to cry in order to feel a release from captive heights of emotional stimulation. But how can you cry away the demons deployed by extraterrestrial beings in a mind you’ve always thought was solely your own?

One cries for long periods of time to attain comfort and be released from the pain of their external surroundings. Not in these years.

For those three years my tears were the only way I was able to feel an intimacy with myself. Being in touch with my own sorrow was the only way I would relish the familiarity of my old self before aliens arrived. They had the ability to invade me without permission. My thoughts were constantly plagued with images of war, gore, suffering, and destruction, hunger. It was inhumane and the warmth of these tears were the only way I escaped the cold inhumanity of searing mental images that ceaselessly superimposed itself on the life I was desperately trying to live – a reality I was begging my inner demons to help me overcome. And for every year I stayed silent to the chaos of my internal world, the news became a circus of global tragedies. Any one who spoke the truth of their internal realities were thrown into asylums where they were condemned to perish.

We lost five million humans in the first year alone. I could have been a statistic. But I was lucky I kept my mouth shut. I smiled, and curated an image of a happy life. Yet every night I kept myself awake to refuse the torment of the midnight curse. On the other hand, humanity as a whole read more to eliminate the cruel mental images that no one escaped. We doted on books, and cursed our inherent human need for slumber. Even our dream worlds were infected by the curse of a budding intergalactic reality. They haunted us, taunted us. They drove us mad.

Three years after that night, about one billion humans survived. All traumatized, few left in touch with sanity. In a few years we anticipate a new generation of human-alien hapas if the Kingdom of Galas permits cross-species miscegenation. They consider me a lucky one for avoiding the asylum, and being handpicked for my beauty. The lucky ones who achieved the trifecta of beauty, youth, and silence as we endured the descent of a new world, became Bridgemasters.

I used to work three jobs to make ends meet in grad school. 

Thanks to the aliens, I’m a billionaire now.

The price of peace is only a few billion dollars.