A Mourning After

It was the first morning after, when I woke in my bed and found the space beside me empty that I felt completely lost.

A sadness enveloped me. It echoed with the reverberation of the airship engines as it navigated the cloudy skies. Today was the day.

I rose from my slumber, listless and alone. I made my way towards the window next to the bed and gazed at the skyline. It was grey, rain clouds filled the entire landscape below. The weather matched my mood. Dark and clouded.

This was her favorite season, fall in the pacific.

This all felt pointless now, the weather, the mission.

What remains? A fool's hope that all this madness could end? I was foolish to sign onto this. I only wanted her to be happy. I wanted to sustain her hope and feed off it, with greed and envy. She was my salvation. Now she was gone. With her, the hope I shared. Humanity's loss was my loss.

Last week we were invoking the council's will. Prominent leaders bought into our conviction. The hope of mankind would survive if we persevered. Through the worst of a calamity none of us could survive, we would press on. The two of us a capsule of hope. We would bring the past with us, the failures and the lessons. I was a fool not to see it before.

My wife had been my hope. With her gone I felt none. The promises of salvation had become empty and hollow. Yet she would not have me stop, not the both of us, not when we were so close.

If this were to be an end, then let it be our end.

I would follow through for her, even with her gone. She would have wanted me to persevere. To linger. I only hoped I would find solace in the restful slumber of cryogenic sleep.

The world below was crumbling, society had collapsed years ago. The calamity foretold for decades before had befallen man. Now there was nothing we could to do but take to the skies, the flagship of mankind. Erasmus. And a fleet of airships hovering above the clouds, escaping the worst of it.

But fuel is a fickle thing, even with the aid of sun. Soon that sun too would set upon mankind. And all would fade to blackness. The ships would fail and they would fall, for none can escape inevitability. We reap what we sow.

Mankind had assumed the role of mother nature, we had played god and we had failed. Our presumptive hands slapped down.

The desolation of our home began in the south.

Warm winds carried with it drought and famine. Those winds filled the seas with powerful storms that destroyed the beaches and coastlines. Beautiful mountainsides once filled with white snow packs, dwindled to bare rock. Half the planet quickly became inhospitable to human life.

Starvation followed, then war. Nobody blamed anyone. Not for the fault of bringing this upon ourselves, nor for the fault of killing to survive.

Soon the calamity evolved. Flooding and flames enveloped much of the remaining bastions of civilization.

A collective few who'd foreseen this had fashioned a plan. If not a solution, a contrivance to forestall the inevitable downfall of mankind. Airships capable of sustained flight were built. And mankind left the shambles of Earth's surface to linger in the skies above.

Like the inevitable nature of a disintegrating climate, catastrophe was not avoided. Only forestalled. For years people grew once more complacent. The masses assuming a solution was inevitable as the looming cataclysm.

It began as it always did. A singular event that foreshadowed inevitability.

The first ship fell a year before, with 1500 aboard.

Men, women and children. Dreams of a future, cast into oblivion. All because mankind could not collectively accept how its inaction would inexorably lead to its downfall.

The brigade of aerial survivors were a microcosm of mankind itself. The sheer arrogance that our will alone was sufficient. The absurdity of man's avarice bent low in the face of nature's will. And here we are, mere months from extinction. Our only hope was the cryogenic capsules, that would catapult a select few into an unknowable future.

My wife and I had volunteered, our skill sets setting us apart from the others. We had transcended the lottery and were selected exclusively. We were jubilant and exonerated in our vindication from the ice cold grip of death's bony grasp. Or so I had thought.

My wife was internally struggling, wracked by guilt over her exoneration. Outwardly she shared my joy, but inside she must have felt unworthy. Why else would she have taken her life, in the dead of night, plunging into the dark mass of clouds below?

I put on the last set of clothing I would ever wear, preparing myself for the coming freeze. They would deposit us in a mountain cavity stable enough to sustain us for many years. Every 50 years one of us would awaken, in a continuous rotation that would last a millennia. We were to check on the others, and ensure all was safe. We would briefly monitor the developments of Earth itself. Then we were to re-enter our own stasis and await the final awakening. A thousand year slumber, in hopes that our planet would give us another chance.

The degree of anxiety building up inside me could only be described as akin to a first kiss. But not any first kiss. The first kiss with whom you do so knowing this is person you'll spend the rest of your life with. It was much like that with her. And if her life was spent so soon, would it not speak pre-emptively to the nature of this endevour? Of its inevitable failure? Was this mission doomed like her to a premature end?

I arrived in the chamber of solace, the last chamber of mankind.

Each vessel equipped to contain us in cryogenic slumber.

Each vessel to navigate to a pre-determined location on Earth.

Where our long sleep would begin.

The colonial fleet commander began his rehearsed speech about hope and progress. I heard nary a word.

I stood in front of my vessel. Like the vessel itself, I was empty and alone. My hope of salvation was gone. I felt nothing now.

The order to disembark was given and I stepped aboard and turned about, facing the condemned.

Many cried, and they filled me with despair.

Many stood tall. Stoic in the acceptance of their inevitable fate.

Their faces gave me hope.

Her words filled my head and I laid upon the backrest of my capsule. The empty cavity alongside me, where she belonged was a void of inexorable darkness and solemnity. But still the faces of stoicism outside filled me with hope.

The window closed. The hiss of air escaping filled my eardrums as the sealing vacuum initiated.

A piercing sensation enveloped me along my neckline. Sleepless anxiety was soon overcome with a restful malaise.

The temperature began to drop rapidly.

Then I saw.

My wife stood before me, her hands outstretched. She was beckoning me to come to her, or was she waving goodbye?

People outside the capsule were alarmed. Frantically waving their arms at the guards nearby.

My parents, long deceased stood next to my wife. It filled me with comfort to see that.

They smiled as they gazed at me, tears streaming down their cheeks. Or were those the tears my own? I could not say for certain. Drowsiness had overcome my senses.

I shivered in the cold monolith of time and space.

My wife was there, on the ship.

She wasn't gone after all.

She was there, waiting for me. At the end of this endevour.

If she was there, then all this would not be for naught.

Perhaps, mankind would survive after all.

Perhaps, love would out.

All the avarice, all the insanity and arrogance. The divisiveness.

All could end, expunged by mankind's capacity for love.

As I closed my eyes, I began to hope. Tears filling my eyes as cold slumber overcame me.

Aboard the ship, my one true love wrapped herself in tears.

Together forever but also apart, we wept.