THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: CHANGE IS LIKE A SEASON

Time doesn’t pass right, down here in the tunnels. It hums along, with days and weeks and months piling up in an invisible weight on top of you, baggage that you drag along in silence, that only the other ones can see properly. At some point, when you become old enough, it all falls away and doesn’t matter anymore.  

I’m almost there. I can feel it. 

There are passages down there that go places that the people can’t go; but I can. I’ve walked and crawled them all, and I’m not even one of the oldest ones. I’ve seen a lot, but the elders have seen more. Their memories stretch back to when the island was wilderness, held back by a picket fence that Agnes still calls de Waalstraat. There were natives in the woods then, above where the trains run now, that hunted silent forests and waited for a salvation that would never come. They sold the island and were paid with blood. 

This island eats people. It has always eaten people. 

For me, the change was like a season. Like a spring made of pain, blood, and bone. I remember things up there that were important before. The President and a scandal, and rumors of apocalypse, and that was my whole world, then. But my body moved on. It shifted in directions not mapped in any cell. It spread and developed, and grew, until I shed that world like I shed my pink, fat, skin, and I found my home, and my tastes and my teeth, down here in the dark.

Down here, we pass the time. We meet up, and tell stories, and share meat from the potter’s field that they bring back from their expeditions. Some drink. Some tell stories. And it rolls on like it always did, with Presidents and apocalypses and scandals, and only the names change, and the fat people get fatter, and the trains come and go. A moveable feast, a person once wrote (and I, when I was a person, once read) and that is where I live; inside a moveable feast. But a feast where the food is uncooked and unprepared…unripe. But still, at the same time, everywhere around me. 

So we wait and find them again, when they’re in the ground.  

For the first time in a long time, I leave the tunnels and I walk the platform with my army blanket pulled over my head and I smell the people on the bench, and I watch them from the corner of my eye and listen to their refrain, and it’s like a song I know. Something I’ve heard all my life. I don’t know the precise words, but I can hum the tune.

“…and Martial Law, I mean, it’s all under two feet of fucking sea water. And they shot people, too, you could see it before they cut the video. And the President, she’s all over the news saying…”

Presidents and apocalypses and the dead, just as the world was before my blood spring so long ago. And I say aloud (too loud, because they look up at me, the meat people):

“World without end, hallelujah, hallelujah.”