Chapter 29

29

As the sun slowly starts to rise I begin to pen my first words in what seems like decades.

The words don't flow onto a pad of paper in ink mind you, but in the spiral bound notebook of my mind. A simple word, "she" develops friendships with others like her, forming a sentence that ends with the word "sleep". That sentence comprises a paragraph, which I follow with a grouping of asterisks.

Thirty years pass with those asterisks replacing a catalogue of births, deaths, wars and plagues, yet she is unaware of this lapse in time. During her slumber, she is left undisturbed.

Three decades of human advancement has left the world worse for wear. Cars and humans are being built to be bigger, stronger and hungrier while farmlands and oil reserves are becoming smaller. Everyone she knows has left her tiny Texas town in search of more extravagance. All roads lead to urban excess while suburban hellholes explode with the population.

Her quiet community used to be surrounded by acres of farms and ranches that had been passed down for generations. But between two paragraphs that land has been sold by ungrateful grandsons and purchased by real estate developers who then cut those acres into smaller and much more inept pieces of futility. Overpaid actors then spend millions to buy this small plot of land in order to "get away" from the hustle of Hollywood. Raising cattle is simply another role between movie sets.

Between the paragraphs, lying deep within the asterisks is a dependency. It's a dependency she had not heard of when sleep overcame her. The world has become a medicated place, a place in which the reality of a person's current condition can be assuaged by a single pill, a spending spree at a shopping mall, or an hour with their favorite shrink.

Advancements have been made, and yes, she has missed them all. She doesn't understand the need for a cellular telephone or a hybrid automobile. She's never owned a computer and doesn't understand the Internet. She is particularly confused as to why, given advanced communicative technology, people are more withdrawn than ever. She openly wonders why, after thirty years, why people aren't asking more questions.

The only thing she does know, really, is that sometime during those asterisks the world fell asleep while she, in turn, woke up.