In Open Air: Part 2

The news bordered on madness, but it always did. It was never a matter that it was insane. Just a matter of what we could swallow as "normal enough," to get through our days without asking questions. Disaster was everywhere. If you could have given it a face, it probably would've been me - the messenger.

Everyone wants the truth. But not really. Everyone wants reality delivered to their door. But not really. Given the privelage of knowledge, the idiots seek to bend it to suit their tastes, to clean their hands and to hide their responsibilities for what transpires every day. They want good news stories, so that they can be convinced that what they're doing is good. It's not, and I've seen that.

A century of books, billions of pages, thousands of paragraphs, hundreds of sentences, and one word. A population of 6.1 billion is standing at the precipice with ears cocked to hear this word. Some are covetous, and believe this word will give them what they seek. Some are powermongers, and believe the word is power. Some are hopeless romantics and think the word will heal broken hearts and pave roads with golden intentions.

It's none of these things. One word. It's the death groan of a world overburdoned. It's the last gasp of a suffocating child. It's the last hope for a future buried under generations of vileness.

And yet. It's the first star in the night. That first breeze of spring, the breath of life that so many have learned to live without. It's that burst of intellect that brought mankind upright and face to face with the bomb. May they never find the beam.

So in a sense, the word everyone is trying to hear is power, it is something to be coveted. It is something to, at the very end of everything, be heard.

Nobody knows what that word is, but all know that when they hear it they will both quail with unspeakable terror, and also breathe a death-rattling sigh of relief.

Words, as hollow as they are sometimes, are a very real force. If one word is a world, begun and ended, then each sentence is a history, every letter an epoch. Do you recall each one?