Please

Oh god, someone help us, please.

But there's no god in this place anymore....

It's been almost two months but it's hard to tell what exactly is going on

when what happened

when we are right now.

Because you know what? Walter was right. Zach was right. Even fucking Collectorshit was right.

I suddenly have this feeling that everything was connected. It's like I could see the whole thing, one long chain of events that stretched all the way back before this all started, and I'm not going to live long enough to find out the truth. I feel like I can see everything that happened, and everything that is going to happen. It's  like a perfect pattern, laid out in front of me.


And I realised we're all part of it, and all trapped by it. 

Time doesn't mean anything when you know you're going to die.

Nobody answers our posts anymore. We don't have admin so we can't even see if people are checking the blog in their apparent bout of apathy. But I see you all. I see you all fawning over M and joking about Robert and cheering on Maduin. But M isn't going to help us, and Robert and the Jester...

None of you care.

I'm starting to wonder if you ever did; If anyone ever did in the first place, because what does it matter? As long as you're alive then why in hell's name should any of this bother you; you all have your friends, your "families", and outside of that, the rest of the world can burn.

I don't blame you.

I can't blame you.

All those times chasing chicks and laughing with Zach, working my ass off in high school and being annoyed with my parents; the trip to Italy and learning to fight from that weird pale guy, crying when I fucked up that one time in the school play and seeing my mum cry as I moved out of the house...

... I'm tired of surviving. I just want to live; I want to go home and take a shower and hit something and go to the mall. I want to eat fast food and see a movie and get in a fender-bender. I want to do graffiti and bomb a test and say goodnight to my little brother.


But I can't go back to that anymore.

If this even gets out, if you're reading this, I'm not going to have much time left. That's good, I've got that, but once you realize this, you don't last long in here. It makes you comfortable. Or maybe that's what I tell myself, what I want to believe in this nest of fucking lies and liars.

Because I'm more afraid than I ever had been in my life. I barely sleep anymore; I can feel Him watching me, appraising me like I'm a hunk of meat. I look around camp and I shake. And shake. And shake. I can't stop, We won't stop.

And every so often, someone stops shaking and walks into the trees. The first few, I'd plead with. I'd beg. Scream myself hoarse that they still had too much to do, had people waiting for them, but why would they listen?

It's obvious that nobody's come looking for us. We're the class the world forgot.

Then I turned to violence. Broke some limbs. But Chase isn't... around. And they only ended up dragging themselves out of camp while calmly stating that I'd have to kill them to keep them from going. Even when they screamed for mercy until it all went silent, we didn't follow them. We couldn't.

I don't try to save them anymore.

But maybe I stopped being afraid when Adel gave up. When Wallace, his partner to the end, went into the trees after him. He was shaking too, but it wasn't with terror; and when Lily started screaming and Ian stared into her eyes and told her he loved her since fifth grade and then slit her throat from ear to ear,

She was trying to run to Him. So it goes. And so he wasn't afraid, not anymore.

Heh, look at me. I sound like Lyle. I sound like Zach. Can you blame me?

Because in our lives, this hell, you find something else; you find something that matters more to you than life. They threaten to kill you unless you give them what they want, but you all tell them you'd rather die. You face the fact that this is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time. You become calm. You become still. Maybe that's because you knew what was going on, maybe you knew what you were getting into.

But I didn't.  Twenty years old and I'm going to die because I wanted some extra credit.

It seems strange, seems foreign to type it out, see it so plainly written in this tiny word processor. To, as Walter would have put it, "Confront mortality; see it stretched out before you like a line in the sand, watching the tide of the end grow closer and closer".

He never said anything like that. I'm a fake. I've always been a fake. Trying to be brave for everyone, trying to give them all something to hate. At first I thought it was hate, too, how I would survive through this. Hate was all I knew, it built my world, it imprisoned me, taught me how to eat, how to drink, how to breathe. I thought I'd die with all my hate in my veins. But then something happened. It happened to me... just as it  will happen to all of you. 

... For four months, I've known that it was coming. I've apologized to no one and gotten no apologies in return; parts of me slowly dying, eaten by all my hate and then shutting up when I had nothing left; centimetre by centimetre.

12 by 9.

It's small, and it's grainy; it's a crappy screen on a crappy cellphone that spent way too much time hidden under a desk or in my pocket

And it's the only thing in this fucking place worth having. He's never going to take that from me.

Even if the Collector looks me in the eye as he stabs me in the heart, he'll never be able to take this away.

That's the only thing I can promise.

The only thing I have left.

And here's my last love letter; the last I'll ever write.

...I hope that whoever you are, you escape this mess. I hope that the worlds turns, and that things get better. But what I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that, even though I do not know you, and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or hug you,

I want you to live.

I want to live. I want to know that all of this wasn't for nothing, that my life wasn't nothing, that somewhere  somehow, I made a difference. That this isn't all I'm left with. I want to die decently. I want to never stop fighting until the end.




But I've stopped wishing for things I know I'm not going to get.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry for everything.






"But before you go, I'd like to ask you something."
"Yes?"
"The Tsimtsum sank on July 2nd, 1977."
"Yes."
"And I arrived on the coast of Mexico, the sole human survivor of the Tsimtsum, on February 14th, 1978."
"That's right."

There's a dark jungle next to the village. People who go into it never return. The villagers fear the jungle. Then one day a man with a torch goes in, the villagers scream at him to not, but he does anyway.

"I told you two stories that accounted for the 227 days in between."
"Yes, you did."
"Neither explained the sinking of the Tsimtsum."
"That's right."
"Neither makes a factual difference to you."
"That's true."
"You can't prove which story is true and which story is false. You'll have to take my word for it."
"I guess so."

He returns the next night, crawling back, bleeding to death, claw marks on his back. With his last breath he says 'Within the Jungle lives a Tiger, who is twelve feet long, obsidian claws, and has fire in its eyes...'

"And in both stories, the ship sinks, my whole family dies, and I suffer."
"Yes, that's true."
"So tell me; if it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? The one with the animals, the one with the tiger, or the story without?"

'...but it is just a Tiger and it bleeds.'

"The story with the animals is the better story."
"... Thank you. And so it goes with god."







After that, he dies. 








--Richard Battle