The Tunnel

If you walked far enough away from my house, nested away in the forest, and started to walk towards the city, the first thing you would notice would have to be the walls. I live on high ground, you see – I like being close to the sky, because it makes me feel like I can go anywhere, even if all I do is sit and stare at it. It’s not so much about actually doing it… it’s really just about the feeling, you know? Anyways, you would notice the walls because you’re walking down this giant mountain and starting to go below ground so the city planners built these giant walls to lead you in. Maybe it was pretty in a weird, creepy way back when it was brand new but now it’s just gross in a weird, creep way. There’s all kinds of stuff splattered against the walls – weird paintings, people’s names carved in way above your head somehow, food rarely. You go farther and farther down and eventually you get to the ceiling, which has really bright lights installed so don’t look directly at them. Instead you keep going and realize that the stuff on the walls start to change. Closer up to the entrance, closer to the forest, the paintings were all about trees, and animals playing, one or two showing people jumping into a pond that you can see out my window at the mountain top, and lots about the sky with all its stars and clouds and magic. Once you get below ground there’s still animals but they look a lot meaner, and the paintings become more crude drawings showing animals killing people or vice versa. This is because all the people that decided to live below ground were the ones that got tired of fending off nature. They’re the farmers who lost all their crops to insect swarms and rabbits, or the unlucky few that had been attacked by wolves or bears while they were travelling, or sometimes just people who visited more developed areas and realized you didn’t have to shit out in the woods on rainy days. So they got tired of all that stuff and moved away, but fortunately for historians and not so fortunately for the greater artistic world never lost their taste for creative expression and so vented their frustration not just on the Earth by building a giant tunnel into her but also by decorating that tunnel with all of their hatred. It gets… worse, the farther down you go. Instead of just normal day to day killing of animals or being killed by animals people start putting up weird sex stuff with animals, almost like rape-revenge fantasies sometimes, or where they exaggerate that whole relationship and wallow in their own self-pity and suffering so that they imagine all of these horrible and disgusting things happening to their mangled corpses. So you keep walking down this long, long hallway, for miles and miles and miles, and you pass these big gates that you have to wait for the guards to open for you, and eventually you reach a fork in the road. Now this fork will either take you to the nice pretty city on the left or to something far less pretty and nice on the right. You can go right ahead and go to the city and watch pretty pictures on giant screens and buy all the great jewelry straight out of the surrounding mines and eat all this expensive food they have shipped down in giant elevators that lead back up to the top. But that’s not what this story is about – so you take the right. There aren’t as many lights down this way – it goes to one of the big mine shafts that was eventually deemed structurally unsound and so was abandoned fairly early on in the city’s life. So you keep going and the walls turn from cement and stone into dirt and wooden support beams, and there’s really not any paintings because the people that live here don’t really have anything to paint with. Instead you start to smell piss and shit and vomit because nobody’s gonna go walk thirty miles to the outside to use the restroom and if they tried to go to the city they’d be shot. You walk and walk and walk and last time I was there all the lights for the last few miles were out so hopefully you brought a light of your own and then you reach this bigger living space. Here you turn off your light because in this area are these little orbs of light that float around and illuminate sunken eyes and ragged beards and hopeless faces. There’s not very much to eat, you see, so instead people have to walk all the way out here to slowly starve and thirst to death. And in reality, these lights are just some unexplainable natural phenomenon but you can’t help but feel like there’s something significant about the fact that they only show up in this shithole mine shaft full of dying exiles from society. That once you’ve forsaken nature, and subsequently, ironically but also fittingly, been forsaken by people, you are given the small mercy of little dancing lights to lull you into the afterlife. I always try to take some of these people with me but they’re too sunken and ragged and hopeless to move. They spent all their energy coming here because this is all they knew what to do – as if they’ve forgotten that the outside world exists, and are simply willing to follow what they know to their death instead of realizing that there’s a better way. But there’s nothing I can do or say to convince them so instead I sit down and give out some scraps of food and water that are usually ignored and watch the little lights dance for the dead.