First, observe the ground. Be curious as to how you fell. See the specks of dirt. Feel the twigs digging into your chest. Don't be afraid, don't shut down or try to swim away. Take a look around, and inside, and see how the fall reverberated through your bones. Count your teeth and tally your losses.

Now, it's to get back up again. A deep breath. A tornado to fill your lungs. A storm to wash away whatever's left. You've fell, your ground has shaken, and now you start building again. When you clear all the rubble, start with the crevices of your brain. Don't let any thought left hanging. Don't let any parasite eating away at your power.

Now you look around, standing. You now have two world views colliding. You try to put the two together. You see things differently. You never think that falling means you can't start building. You never see yourself as doomed. You just take another breath. Take out a pen, and start planning. Maybe keep in mind that the likelihood of falling again, of failing again is always there, don't forget that.

And now, a new blueprint in hand, you start back up again.

It felt wrong on a primal level for him to see his own guts.

That's the thought that kept bouncing back and forth in his head. Bouncing like the sharp sound that cut the air right before he felt a punch to his stomach that drove him to the ground. Bouncing, taking place of more important thoughts, like calling for help or telling his mother it would be okay. I can see my own guts, he thought. And that all it seemed to matter.

In this grayish city, where he never really belonged, where his father had a supermarket and he wanted his eldest son to take over, like it was some sort of throne, not an extra shackle to his feet. In this ambiguous town, caught between farmlands and modern roads, never sure of its identity, with people always trying to force theirs onto others. Trying to revive the old ways and dress up the corpse in the modern clothes of today, claiming they couldn't feel the rot. The city that finally decided enough was enough, and they drove against the multiple corpses wearing crowns, trying to take the food from under their feet.

But the corpses were fed power for too long, and they wouldn't give it up easily, and they cracked down on everyone. And that's how he found himself bleeding on the side of the road, the injustice of his birthright cut his guts open. Nothing mattered really, he wanted to get out, and so he did.

You wear your armor, made of steel and vulnerable dreams. Go for the risk, the Maybe of success rather than the stagnant never.

You're twelve, your teacher tells you to forget about painting. So you spray their face with glitter, hoping for some of it to end up in his iris. Perhaps that way he could see the world a little brighter.

And now you're fifteen and you dress down your soul and up your body with the masks bought from the shopping center. The mask on your face is the latest hit, but it's ill-fitting and makes for a bad cover. Somehow, everyone can spot a faker even in a world where everyone is faking. Take off that mask and throw it out.

It's the edge of the world and you're hesitating, should you jump or huddle in the lap of your mother. You're eighteen and every cell of you wishes for the free air and the warm nest at the same time. You take a deep breath, jasmine and your mother's perfume safe in your lungs, and off the ledge you jump.

And now you're an oak, cracked old and mighty. Your fingertips remember the strings of the violins and your nostrils still swimming in the oily smell of colors. The rings of your trunk tell a story of a life well-lived. And from your branch hangs a little swing, it helps a little kid play while you teach him to dream. And sing the song of life using the patterns of shade and light.

It takes the whole nation to make a tyrant. And it takes a tyrant to make the whole nation wake up.

I want to tell you a story, about a corrupt human being drunk on power and gold (is there anyone who can't be corrupted by those two?) and I want you to listen carefully, even though the entity of history has this story written over and over again. We still fell for that king, so the story needs to be told again.

No one was immune to the seduction of the United Throne. It sat at the heart of the human continent. Surrounded by shining cities like jewels stitched to the night sky. He wasn't the only one to try and take it by force. But he was the smartest, he played on the fears of the people, the hate simmering just beneath the surface. He played at the sleep-walking subjects doing what they've been told to do with no objection. He played at the cynics, crying that no power could derange the current of time, no human was able to take the stylus of history and write whatever he wanted.

But night always comes to dawn. And the darkest times are the labor of the brightest lights. And so when he took the throne by force, a ripple went through the threads of time. It shook continents awake. It was, as everyone remembers it, the time to look in a daze at their surroundings, and to decide that this is not the way History will be written. And that that stylus is most honest when many hands join together to hold it.

I'll tell you a story old as time. I want you to stay awake, from start to finish, and then keep yourself awake after that. Because this story should never be forgotten.

You fight by starting small, in your own home or in your neighborhood. You fight when you do something good, when you are stubbornly positive in the grim faces looking at you from every corner. You fight by speaking up. You fight when you open up your heart for empathy, when you understand that the pain you once felt is now mirrored in another human being. You fight when you do what you need to do, what you love to do, because the world so desperately needs for actions done out of love. You fight when you refuse to be led out of fear. You fight when you learn. And when you stay up late to study or work. And when you kiss your loved one and hug your friend. You fight when you watch a movie because you need a good laugh. And when you converse with a book, and when you see a beautiful painting and let it touch your soul.

You fight when you take care of yourself, when you love your body and mind. When you show that love in action. When you kiss your scars and hold the body that houses your soul. When you forgive your own mistakes. You fight when you fail, when you know you did your best. You fight when you tell yourself it's okay, and when you stand up and try again.

You fight now. In this moment. Not in any other time.

Donʼt unsettle him,

The boy sitting so still.

He grasps horses in his veins,

And tries to restore the clockwork,

That is his heart.

Donʼt be fooled by the calm,

It glosses over his eyes.

His mind is a racing wonder,

And his thoughts are little toddlers,

Wrecking havoc in his mind.

Washed in the static of those heedless thoughts.

He sits there and only hopes for a breath

To clear the ice jolted in his chest.

This song has a long whispering part that Florence made sure no one can understand. But it has such a feeling that I had to try and write what I felt could be the whispered part, so here goes:

In every drop of water,

Moving down the stream.

Shaping the the world around it

with its gentle caress.

In every stepping stone,

relentless, smoothed over,

but never falling apart.

In the glint of sunlight

and the soft treading of stags

in the glitter of hidden gems

you can hear my voice

you can see my face

in the soft turning of nature

And the patience of earth

And every sound of laughter

Marrying the joyful wild

And the stones you step on

Never knowing the magick they hide.

And in the darkest part of the forest

And in the deepest faith in the break of dawn

Hear my voice, there I chant

I will be, I will be

Silence will not cover me.

https://youtu.be/vhGz6BLywIo

It may sound odd but when the world ended, we didn't find out at first. We already had shortages in electricity, and the internet lines have been fried for weeks; an attack by the terrorists, according to the government (hint: they were lying, they just wanted to corner us and cut us from the rest of the world and from each other). Riots were a daily occurrence, people stopped going to work. And every small town was its own country, cut from the rest. Deaths weren't rare, and when your country has been in a civil war for years, it's hard to care much about the rest of the world.

It was my turn to get our water rations. I was thinking how much I stunk. Showers were pretty low on our list of priorities. I was trying to hum a tune I used to play on the violin, before I sold it to get us some food.

The drone of the airplanes made everyone in the water lines tense. Everyone knows that if you have time to hear its sound, the plane probably wasn't coming after your town. But we tensed all the same, ready to spring home in case it started firing. I hugged what I already had of water close, chaos always invited thefts. But the airplane passed us and left a cloud in its wake. We kept monitoring the descending cloud, which turned out to be slips of paper. A notice by the government.

I went to pick it up, not much concerned. It was probably a reminder of the curfew or an invitation to turn the terrorists in (another hint: we didn't hide any terrorists, but it was hard to make them believe that). But this paper was different: it described a set of symptoms, the combination was nothing I've seen before, even though I'm the town's helping doctor. A few of them stood out, horrific descriptions of people biting and milky white eyes, the sick moving unnaturally fast, their upper limbs convulsing uselessly by their sides. It told us to hide from whoever showed those symptoms, or shoot them if we had the means to (we also didn't have access to guns, but they didn't believe that either).

I went home, a little concerned but a little unbelieving too. Even though I've seen many things during the past five years, it was still hard for me to wrap my head around the images those descriptions conjured.

It wasn't until a few hours later that the waves began. They came from the fringes of the town, where they weren't supposed to be, where soldiers should've shot them on the spot. We later found out that some of them were soldiers. We holed up in our home. A tiny apartment for about five families. And we saw them convulsing their way, groaning, hitting walls and then walking away as if nothing has happened. Hitting each other, biting each other, but shrieking in what seemed to be disgust at the taste. They seemed to hover around sources of light, so we turned off our candles and waited in the dark. The sounds outside a haunting chorus that fed the horrors we felt. No one cried, we were all past crying over horrors and the possibility of death. This was just a new form of hell that was thrown at us. Tonight I shall sleep restlessly, and tomorrow, we'll find a way to face it and survive. Because really, what else can we do.