tc

10–01–25

There was a certain satisfaction in the irony: me, a foreboding hooded figure, smashing through the front window with such furious conviction. And yet all I brought with me was a polaroid camera, a notebook, and the intention to catalogue the traces of yet another evaporated human life. In dense cities like New York and Chicago I moved fast, apartment after apartment, axing through doors, absorbing diaries, analyzing photographs, and questioning decor choices. Polaroids and scribbled notes filled page after page of my records, capturing every hint of passion and pain within each human museum. But selfishly, it was the unassuming backroad homes I loved to explore most. That was where I often found the strangest records of human existence.

The most interesting by far had certainly been Thomas Jefferson Community College in Claremont, Tennessee with its hidden basement cellar, set of chains, and 20 human remains slumped against the walls. What a fractured existence some particularly fucked-up person must have led. I remember how I froze, one foot still glued to the bottom stair, my gaze shifting crazily between 40 empty eye sockets. It was the first time I felt I wasn’t entirely in control of myself. For nearly an hour I stood there, as if I were waiting for their chins to lift slightly and stare back at me. I stayed in that town for a week, scouring police records for missing-person cases. I cut out each plausible name and taped them into my records beside the polaroids - all taken from the same angle at the bottom of the stairs. Before I left town, I felt an urge to go back and apologize to them, but decided to burn the school down instead. Walking away, smoke rising behind me, I realized it might be the closest I’d ever come to seeing a human face on this earth again.

That was six months ago. Travel has grown harder since then. Gas is easy enough to siphon, but animals have grown bold, and nature has started reclaiming the roads. A couple months back, I saw a grizzly bear sunning itself - stretched out across the faint yellow lines running down the Main Street of some tiny town in West Virginia. Part of me wanted to simply go up and kneel beside it, half expecting to find some recognition in its eyes - but the other part of me knew it would be the last thing I did in this life (and at least a quarter of me wondered if that might be a good thing.)

Instead, I slipped into a corner store and waited for hours until the creature finally lumbered back into the trees. Once again, I lacked control in that moment. I didn’t know why this body preserved me, kept me walking here, in this emptied world day after day.

But here I was, polaroid camera slung around my neck, record book in hand, standing before the next museum of possibilities: a two-story family home tucked into the trees off a winding backroad near Liberty, Georgia.

Liberty.

That was one human quirk I had always loved - the idealism. Fierce attachments to intangible ideas like “freedom” and “happiness,” the way whole lives orbited around the gravity of a single word. And now all of that passion had boiled down to just me. Laughable. But at least I was curious - and maybe that’s all I really had to be now anyway.

The cracked paint and molded-over tire swing out front promised years, maybe even generations of stories. I smiled briefly in anticipation as I stepped through the threshold, but my grin was torn away as the flimsy workman’s bench I was using as a step-stool collapsed beneath my weight. I pitched forward, my soft stomach folding into the jagged shards of a lazily broken window.

If only I had been a bit more careful about clearing the glass.

The shock came first. Not pain. Just the chill of glass shards burying themselves into my gut. I stopped, eyes wide, my attention snapping onto the layer of dust peeling off the dining room table, as if retreating from the rude commotion of my imminent death. A rooster-shaped clock was ticking gently in the kitchen, as if nothing had happened at all, as if its family hadn’t long-since vanished, as if a mysterious intruder weren’t bleeding out on the window frame.

“Shit,” I heard myself whisper.

My record book was crushed beneath my hands, treacherous in their failure to catch me. But in seeing the book for even a second, even at a time like this, I couldn’t help but think of her.

Half out of my mind, I forced the cover open despite the fresh pain of glass between ribs tearing through me. I had to see her one more time.

Rachel.

I met her in Iowa, or rather, that was where I pieced her together. Twenty-three diaries spanning twenty years of life, supported by her mother’s obsession with photographs, resulted in a ghostly rekindling of Rachel in my imagination. I only stayed in her house for the day, uncovering the extensive collection of diaries like ancient treasure, and picking pictures of the walls like flowers in a field.

But why did I take them with me? I still didn’t know. I’d never really felt the obvious temptation to collect artifacts as I wandered through homes, instead finding immense satisfaction with my polaroids and written observations. For no others did I carry dreams across state lines, never did I put the weight of their hopes in my backpack.

But Rachel was different somehow - she was so vivid even when she was young; a natural storyteller, a genius even. I often chuckled at her insistence that she wanted to be a doctor, clearly writing it as more of an instruction rather than a diaristic confession. Sometimes I thought I knew her better than she knew herself. But surely, if given the chance, she would have realized her purpose was to be a writer.

In the flat plains of Texas I read through her high school anxieties, descriptions across the full spectrum of whimsy and dread. In the Appalachians I read about her first love: the stolen glances at freshman orientation and its devastating collapse at homecoming. In the South I turned tear-stained pages as she reminisced on her childhood years while imagining what her future in university might bring. I often smiled at the insignificance of it all, knowing how large these moments loomed in her brief life. She probably wrote for hours every single night. What a silly girl, so desperate to capture every moment.

But as my own pool of blood began to advance onto the pages of my records, the girlish face in the torn photograph that I had haphazardly taped into my notes began to morph. Her eyes began to twinkle and the corners of her lips started to pull. Her chest began to rise and fall, slowly, rhythmically, true. As I gazed into this living, breathing human face, an epiphany tore through me sharper than the glass in my ribs: I don’t want to die.

Until now I’d walked in utter arrogance, ignorantly convinced all manufactured meaning had been drained away from earth following the end of humanity. But here it was: nostalgia, regret, the unbearable thought of never reading Rachel’s journals again, never stepping into another home, never feeling the faint reverberations of a life once lived. Never feeling anything again. When did I fall so in love with the simple act of feeling something?

And for the first time in this year of purgatory, I cried. It still mattered. It had always mattered. How had I been so cold before? How could I not understand why they always chose to return?

In my increasingly hazy vision, I made out the shape of small wooden cross hung on the kitchen wall. A faint smile, similar to the one usually reserved for Rachel’s sincere naiveté incredulously found it’s way to my face. I wondered how long it had been since I met the inhabitants of this house. Obviously they were expecting a biblical god, so I’m sure they were shocked to find me in the afterlife.

I longed as I never had before to remember meeting them, though the moment had surely passed me by as monotonous and insignificant at the time. Why was I now so desperate to know which human it was that put up this cross; to remember even a single word of how they must have begged and pleaded to be re-incarnated?

I also thought of the first-ever human who knelt at my feet, begging for another chance to live even after a lifetime of misery in early human civilization. I had cruelly laughed, taunted them, warned them that I would send them back, but make the next life even worse. And yet their eyes lit up! They thanked me tearfully, just as they would every time after that.

And so I always sent them back to Earth. They died younger, suffered more, became crueler, became stupider. And still, after every life, they pleaded to live again. At some point over the centuries I stopped being surprised by humans. Even those who had ended their own lives on earth still begged to be reborn; to be sent back to make all the same mistakes.

I was so convinced my experiment had failed, that my existence, just like humanity was doomed to be endlessly cyclical and meaningless. I assumed humanity was just drunk on living; choosing to reincarnate not because they were wise, but because they were addicted. But now, glass shards buried deep in my stomach, Rachel’s picture beneath my palm, I finally understood this ‘gift’ they all insisted I had given them.

Despite never falling in love, never having a family, never even chasing dreams of my own - there was still an indomitable ache for more buried deep inside this physical body. And now I was doing the most human thing possible: dying while desperately replaying my lonely, insignificant life devoid of all purpose or meaning.

And yet, I will miss it.

And when this body is no longer able to hold my spirit, and I’ve returned to myself, I know what I will do.

With the last of my strength, I drag myself across the shattered threshold until I flop limply onto the kitchen floor. The camera is smashed and the record book has slipped from my grasp.

But it’s okay. I want leave it here - my own artifact, my own mark of human existence - now properly memorialized within the walls of this museum.

I no longer need my research anyways, because when Version 2 of the experiment begins, I don’t intend to change a single thing.