Diary

Place your hand on a leather-bound book. Unlabeled, inviting. Open it slowly -- it feels if you went faster, you would snap the cover in two. The penmanship is ornate and neat. You know you wrote this; it even has your name on the inside of the front cover, next to a single word: “Diary.” Your heart says this was ages ago, but every date is creeping closer and closer to the present.

Long sprawling entries detail days long since gone. Friends made with the local plants. Pressings of “friends” no longer living. They stopped talking -- you miss them so, so you keep them within the pages as mementos to ensure you always remember what you have had. The trees, the flowers, your beloved sibling. If it weren’t for these reminders, you might have forgotten. It’s been months since you last saw them. Disappeared in the wake of smoke, fire, and anguish.

They used to be so full of life, but the last time you saw them, they felt dead on the inside. Cold -- to perfectly contrast the explosion of their quickly approaching absence. You couldn’t talk to them about what was happening, you didn’t want to feel like you were prying. How dare you want to be the one asking questions to one of the most important people in your life, you busybody.

Turn back away from that painful memory -- turn directly into another one. Your gaze falls square on a flower, perfectly pressed and preserved in the pages. This one always would talk so fondly of the mountaintops. It would hike for days and days to reach the peak of several mountains, all to enjoy the view and the journey. Air is thin that high up, but the flower didn’t care. It got to be with its friends the whole time.

But eventually, the flower stopped responding to your inquiries about its life. No more conversation about all the wonderful things you can see on hiking trails. No more stories of wild deer darting across the path. No more swapped tales of stargazing. Where it stood firmly rooted in the ground, without that conversation, felt so much colder. Every time this happens, it feels as though you failed your friends by not being there. So you gently pluck it, and bring it to your room to begin the preservation process. Quickly quickly, before it decays and rots away. Before you lose the greatest reminder of your friendship: the flower itself.

Every time you read anything from this accursed tome, you can feel it tearing your insides to pieces. Your heartstrings snipped, nerves on fire. But it cannot be forgotten -- to forget this diary is to forget your humanity. Close the book, replace it upon the large wooden shelf you found it on. Slide it between photo albums and memorabilia of a life so cruelly swept out from underneath you. Memories of a family vanished into thin air. A sibling vanished, a mother vanished, a father who said he would return with them both -- this was six weeks and three days ago.

The room is gray. Your heart is gray. The storming clouds outside, dropping rain without end, also form inside you. Every drop is a stinging sensation that never quite fades. So you leave the room. You open the door. And you leave, to wander the forest. These woods that have gone eerily quiet. The silence deafens, even over the rain. Ever since people started disappearing -- the plants too went silent. Their souls vanished. Your ties to happiness vanished.

So you walk. Forget everything for a little while in the cold and colorless world you know.