September 7 - End

Welcome, traveller, to Aurelium, the Golden City, the City of Lights. You will need to present your travel records and proof of identity to the Dogs at the gates, they will assess your validity for entry into the city. 

The same message plays over and over again, every thirty seconds, over thin slots in the walls. I’m standing in long corridor bounded by low alloy walls. People line up single file, listening to the message over and over again. All sorts of different people, large and small, pale and dark, all lined up like leeks in a trough. At the far end, where the trough meets the shining gates of the City, a door opens and closes, sliding whisper quiet on some sort of rails, admitting one lost soul at a time. I can tell it’s quiet, because everybody is completely silent, except for the one over the speaker system. The doorway is completely dark, nothing is visible beyond. I wonder what the City will hold for me. For the man behind me, and for the woman in front.

Aurelium is the final destination. For everybody. Everybody spends their life travelling to it, yearning for it. Everybody in the world, and I mean that. I can see them all gathered here in this line. I see a woman with the white hair and wild eyes of the south. There is a young girl with dark skin, clutching a small stringed instrument to her chest. I see a man tattooed with his lineage, at long last come to his new home. Everybody here carries remnants of their life, and the lives of their ancestors who journeyed their entire lives that one of their distant descendants could one day set foot in utopia. They carry the scars of their journey through the wasteland that is our world. Red blotchy scars on arms that have been burned by fire, and missing fingers on those burned by snow and cold. 

We pilgrims, we believe. One day we will reach paradise. A place where we will no longer hunger, or feel the cold, or die from the heat. Where we will not have to fear the claws and fangs of the predators, or the blades of predators that walk on two legs. There are those who have given up on our journey, our destiny. They have forgotten that once we flew through the stars in our golden city, and that when all of Aurelium’s wayward children have returned we shall do so again. But some will not return. They stop at the side of the road to rest, and they do not rise again. They build a more permanent camp, then a house, then a village. They stare at us from their doorways with their sad eyes. They pity us, even though they  are the ones who are lost, they are the ones that will never taste paradise. I do not understand them. 

I hear the message six hundred and forty-one times before I finally reach the front of the line. The golden doors slide open in front of me. A faint warmth emanates from the dark doorway. This is my salvation. I believe it, I do. I step forward.