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I stumbled in the dark, flailing frantically as I tried to make out where I was. I couldn’t feel anything – in fact – my body felt numb. My shoulders were weighted by boulders, and my chest was a magnet pulling towards the ground.
A flash of green and yellow suddenly blinded my sight, blaring into my eyes, in which I tried to cover. It was so bright, I could see it seep into the cracks of my eyelids and into the irises of my eyes. I felt the light wrap around my body as I gradually grew lighter and lighter.
Slowly but surely, the light subsided, and so had the weight on my body. My body felt a sensation full of senses. A calm, gentle breeze tickled my cheeks, and the scent of the great wilderness drifted into my lungs.
As I opened my eyes, I was bombarded by a vast, gleaming horizon. It glimmered and shined; twinkled and bright. It lit up with all sorts of colors, delicately painted onto the canvas I gazed upon.
“Ah, Gord’n!” A familiar voice called out to me on my left shoulder. “Man, is it nice to see ya here!”
I whipped my head to look at you, only to find a short, caucasian man wearing a Civil Protection uniform standing before me. Your face seemed to have carried many scars and wrinkles from time and age. Your hair grayed and swept to the side of your face. Ah. Barney.
I silently nodded at you, greeting him with the gesture. You returned the nod and gave a bright expression. You seemed tired, yet alive and full of energy – maybe a little disoriented and confused. “Gee, this place is quite the sight, alright! But you’ve just gotta take a look over there.”
My expression scrunched in confusion as I looked up at the sky once again, soon shifting my gaze behind you. There was an array of wooden statues, all almost lined up in a way you’d find in an organized art museum.
“They’re giving me the creeps,” you continued, suddenly doing a cartoonish shudder of fear. “So… After you, Doc?”
I cringed even more as my confusion multiplied, bewildered by the direction this dream was taking me. Of course, a dream. We both let out a laugh at how bizarre the situation was, as if you had been aware of it as well. I nodded my head and started walking, following my lead.
We both approached the first set of wooden statues, both standing still, unmoving and lifeless. “Well, I’ll be damned…” you commented, studying the wooden figures from a ‘safe’ distance. “They’re life-sized.. ‘us!’ ”
I silently listened to you bicker as I studied the objects up close. I slid my hands across the wooden statue that resembled me, the surface cold and smooth, like polished wood. I took a mental note on how it seemed to be in a lab coat, and how it had the same nametag I had back in Black Mesa. It seemed to have resembled me – or us – before the Resonance Cascade.
“So.. ya done inspecting the, er. ‘Evergreen-man?’” You suddenly put my thinking to a pause, as I slowly twitched my head to look over at you, expressionless and stiff. “..Aw, come on! You know it was funny!”
I let out a sigh and chuckled, shaking my head as we moved forward to the next set of sculptures. It seemed to resemble.. air vents. We were crawling through them like barbaric, sock-smelling air duct rats, racing each other through the vents, making the place smell like wet socks. It really proved how bad the air ventilation in Black Mesa was, despite being government-funded.
“Man, I was always ‘ stumped’ whenever you won those damn races!” you exclaimed, laughing loudly. My face once again cringed, as I playfully elbowed you to quit it. “Alright, alright!” You laughed, putting your arms up in defeat. “I’ll try to stop, okay?”
We continued to pass by many more wooden figures scattered on the pathway, depicting each and every moment of the past; from small experiments, now the Resonance Cascade. Statue’s faces filled with horror, weapon in hand and sprinting in all directions.
The orchestra of crickets that were ever so quiet suddenly crescendo, thundering through the grass and into the starry sky above. Each note rang and ripped inside my earlobe, my head aching and pulsing with each chirp. It all hurt, until..
Until it didn’t. It all… stopped.
The crickets suddenly fell silent as the wind settled to softer than a whisper. My head became numb and my body wasn’t sore. I noticed that you haven’t spoken a word, and seemed awfully quiet since the statues were fragments of the Resonance Cascade. Because of this, I turned to look at you out of concern, until you finally spoke.
“This is as far as I go,” you said, giving a gentle smile while nodding your head. Before I got the chance to say anything, you turned your back and already started to walk away. A part of me wanted to follow you, but I wanted to adventure out to look at the statues up ahead, as they now seemed to have more ‘present-time’ appearances, as the statues of you now wore the same Civil Protections uniform.
The sudden time skip never bothered me anyway. It wasn’t at all new for the unexplainable and unexpected to happen to me. Being snatched up by a mysterious, suited man, to being dropped off in a train was almost like a normal Friday morning. I never questioned or thought too much about it, not one bit.
But maybe I should’ve.
My gaze locked onto your statue’s face as I finally began to realize it all. Each scar and wrinkle, and your now cold, stiff expression. The details had finally caught up to me, and I had been too late to realize it. Were you.. always this sad?
I looked behind me, noticing how far away you were from me now. Your back was faced towards me as you walked further from me, the distance between us growing by the mile. I wanted to reach out to you, call out your name and shout, but I couldn’t. I stayed glued to the ground, frozen like the wooden sculptures we passed along the way.
It was never like I had the chance to speak, anyways. We were always busy in our own worlds, fighting and barricaded into them. We both had a million eyes chiseled onto us, watching our every move, like the millions of stars that wrapped around the skyline and above.
I sometimes wondered if you had been one of the billion – if not trillion – of eyes engraved onto me. You weren’t the same person I knew anymore, unlike those wooden statues. That predictable, warm and familiar look, now vanished and engraved into the memory of the past. Now, your gaze is unpredictable, almost foreign and indistinguishable. Sometimes, I wonder..
Are we okay?