She is taking me off the Capital this morning. We drive in her truck down the highway to the edge of the city fields. No people of Solis live there. It is an ominous place, they told me in school.

The land is abandoned, the road littered and broken with old century-style iron fences. Harvested straw poured from a rotting, old barn, blackened and crisp by the sun of Solis that never set. There were rumors about the cursed land at the Capital, how they took away the soul of people and lured them to their demise.

Ever since the Great Panic, she tells me, people have been killing themselves, thousands of them. They drive down this abandoned path in their shiny white cars, stopping wherever the last drop of fuel runs off, and walk to the edge of the world, burying themselves under the burning wild florae.

But aren’t we already in the best place possible? I ask. We are born to be living the rest of our lives, we stay at the best age and appear immortal: there’s no war, no hunger, no pain, and no death, everyone is equal – we built the best city Capital in the world on the ruin of the Dark Ages, look at those white towers and gardens! Why do they want more?

For the natural feeling of life, she answers. Birds soaring over peaks, gliding past eaves, and hiding under mother’s wings. Flowers growing not in lines, rectangles, or circles but in a field of habitual beauty.

Like in the Old Ages? I ask.

If that’s what you’d like to call it, yes, she says. And if I had the fortune to do so, I would create a death of my own.

_____________________________________

Last year was her third sixteenth birthday.

As we traverse the highway, the only remains of civilization within our sight sit abandoned next to the endless wild wheat swaying, bending, and exhaling.

In late August, the wheat ripens into a sea of gold. The summer wind is calm, the sun prosperous, the tiled blue sky full of white clouds, aureate spindrift sliding into their purple shadows. The earth dies where there is no shelter from the wheat, and the swaying stalks give a hoarse, sunstroke whine, melting into sweet, sticky summer ale. There is no sign of where the road could lead, and the way we had come lost itself in the wind. We don’t know what the time is, nor do we need to. The sun in Solis never sets.

_________________________________________

You talked about death. I ask. What is it like?

For a moment she bursts into laughter, but for then her body seems thin and transparent as if it might disappear into the swirling wind. “No one knows before they tried, sister,” she pronounced the word slightly and lazily, and the t’ turns into d’, “I promised to leave alone on the next birthday – but I regretted, sister. I will wait for you,” tucking a lock of hair behind her ear into the collar, she looked back, “You shall come and feel it with me.”

Feel what?

“The sound of my death.” Tick-tock, tick-tock. She mentions it like it’s nothing. “We won’t grow old here, nor will there be an end to the suffering unless you ask for it.”

“Can you see the wheat over there? I've seen people – tons of them – making love in between, their limbs entwining over each other's hands and feet, their clothes piled under the trees, their hair and sweat flowing together. Monsters.” You know what? She asks, their panting was like the sound of the breaking straws.

“This is our life, and that is how we treat it.” She paused. “Something under our feet – some existence – loved us and cursed us, banning us from death and from living. It placed us in this desert and had fun seeing us either hovering and screaming or addicted to self-hypnosis. Sometimes people feel like they're living in an endless squeezing – Squeeze, can you sense that?” she held her tongue briefly. “Our lives, our health, our time, and our emotions. They are like figs that have been squeezed dry, except that sense of oxygen being sucked out, nothing is left.” 

“You see those walls over there?” she asks, her voice low and looming as a distinct whisper.

“We start staring at it from the time we were born and live behind them like captive stock. Sometimes I feel them – the bricks – leaning on my backbone.”

She smiles, “you know how heavy they are?”

“We constructed the New Age; we ended wars. We killed our land and our animals, we let the skyscrapers collapse and the fences rot, and we built up – the greatest city in the world, that’s what they taught you, right? – the Capital, locking generations behind ignorance.”

But we have no solution for ourselves, but that of sex, addiction, boredom, and destruction. She said, shall we adhere, or shall we exist? I looked anxiously around me: eternal is instinct, the walls, schools, doctors, and mirrors – all bright and light, rooting and rotting in the unceasing present – like me, stretches out to hold but could not.

Poor fool, she said, we are burying ourselves alive.

Yet there is no answer I can give, nor comfort I can offer.

The wind is blowing again. There is no chaotic wind in the Capital, certainly not in the school. Yet it is soft, so soft, suspending in the air, moving.

We stand in the cluttered field, our white protective suits flapping at the edges. This is not like The Panic, I quietly decided. She is peaceful and forgiving, she grows so steadily in the scorched brown and golden wheat, as if also eternal as the Solis sun.

She is staring at me. For a moment I thought she saw my soul in those brown glasses.

Am I one of those people? I asked, are you leaving me alone?

Not yet. But if we don’t stop it, we’ll all be like that one day.

So, come. She once again announces. You will be a witness to my ending, and when we come here again, the roaring of wind will be the only ode at my funeral.