Just Sayin'

Sometimes, I feel like the world is
ending. It's a feeling that tends to be there, always in the
periphery of my vision, a ghost that disappears once I try to look
directly at it. The End, I feel, is being worked toward behind the
scenes, away from the eyes of others, and the only way to truly see
it is not to see it, it is to feel it. I feel it as an elderly couple
talk happily about the food they're growing in their garden, while
the news speaks softly in the background. My attention is on the
conversation, but if I wait, and listen to the world around me, as
much of it as I can, the elderly speak, and I hear, somewhere, “Eight
more U.S. Soldiers and journalist were killed in Iraq today, when a
roadside bomb...”

I'll sit outside, and just listen. I'll
hear a helicopter cutting through the sky, and somewhere, far off,
the rumble of traffic.

I'll sit outside and hear the sound of
people talking to one another, and the violence they speak, I'll
picture a robbery, a violent crime, a rape, and I'll see the media
attacking something at random to try to gain psychological footing in
dealing with the killing spree of a madman. Somewhere, bombs are
exploding, right now, someone is being raped, right now, someone is
being robbed, and right now, there is a murder taking place. I sit
here, in my living room, the bottom floor, my window open, and I
clutch at the machete sitting beside me.

The people living in this world are for
too volatile for it. This is why, I feel, there is a rumbling, a
vibration, an underlying sense that before we know it, before I
know it, the world is going to collapse. I can see, now, barely,
maybe, in my minds eye, there are missiles somewhere. I don't know
where, I honestly don't want to. I know, not only from what I've been
told, but from the psychic miasma that hangs over everything, that
somewhere out there, doing God-only-knows-what, in
God-only-knows-where, there is a man with the power to kill everyone
on earth, with a single order. I know that if I were perhaps
somewhere else, right now, if I wasn't exactly where I am now,
exactly as I am now, someone out there would kill me.

I know that I could be moments away
from my own death, and I would never know.

I've always wanted to believe that
before a person dies, they can feel something that they cannot
explain. Before a person dies, their mind, the deepest part of their
subconscious knows what is about to happen, and is screaming at them.
I've always wanted to believe that everything could be made clear by
listening to as much as a person could listen to. Maybe it's just
where I'm from. Maybe there's a reason I look to the other side of
this screen and see headlines like “Two more tornado victims found”
and “Death squads, infighting make for deadly day.”

I suppose I wish I could believe in
reason. But I can't.

It's so noisy, so much. But then, I
guess we're part of this world, and that noise is now a natural part
of the planet. Ah well.

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