Rusted Tracks

Life. It's like one big carnival ride. You walk right up to the
doors, a ticket-man greets you and takes your ticket. You smile, he
smiles, and you get lead to your seat. The leather is soft and new,
the bars and wheels are gleaming and shiny. Dazzling lights reflect
from the rims and almost blind your young little eyes. You turn
around and find your parents, or your sisters and brothers. You reach
out your hand and they take it in theirs. Warm, safe and complete. A
gentle voice announces the start of your ride. The car slowly slides
away on the slick glistening rails. Flashing lights streaming all
sorts of beautiful colours and visions. They dance before you as the
track gets taken up beneath your shiny new carriage. The wheels
slowly turn a little bit faster as you go along, incrementally so.
Slowly, but surely, you speed up. The track is nice and slow, pretty
stable, maybe there are some dips in it, some turns and some hills,
but for most people, it's pretty steady.

After a while, your hand feels cold. You look around and find one of
your siblings gone, maybe your parent, both even. You feel a little
emptiness where their warmth was, their seat is empty. Their ride,
over. You don't have much time to notice, the track suddenly shoots
up, not too far, but enough to jar you. The track rises, and then
dips suddenly. You take a deep breath and shut your eyes, it's darker
in the dip. But the track levels out, it starts its slow climb again.
After a little while more, you begin to notice other rides, all
around. They start off close, small and intimate. You recognise the
people on them, friends, family, regular people you know. Then, ever
so slowly, you notice even more rides, farther and farther out,
stretching to infinity into the darkness. The tracks gets a little
bumpier here, more rises and falls, bigger ones too. Some of the
other rides you noticed intersect with yours. That girl you met in
school, her car joins up with yours for a second, she skips over and
takes a seat next to you, her warm hand encased in yours. The track
settles again. Smooth and steady it goes on, flashing lights glimmer
in the darkness, neon signs advertising happiness and love abound.
You take a deep breath, close your eyes and you smile with it all.

Again, your hand feels cold. The girl is gone, her car drifts off
into the distance on different tracks, but yours keeps on coming.
It's faster now, you can feel the wind against your face and the
lights blur on their way past, you can feel the rise ever more
prominently. Steeper climbs and darker valley dot your journey, your
car is almost empty now, all the seats that get filled with passing
friends and acquaintances begin to either stay empty or full. You
lose few people, but you gain even less. You close your eyes and take
a deep breath, the track veers upwards and you brace yourself for the
fall, but it doesn't come. You feel a familiar warmth, coursing
through your hand. You open your eyes and a pair of smiling eyes meet
your own in the hazy darkness, now slowly filling with a white light.
Behind you, you can hear the sound of laughter. Children crowd the
seats and your family too, they nestle together, filling the empty
seats of your cart and you smile. The wind dies down slowly, the
signs settle out and lessen, but the light never fades.

Some time passes on this level track, but it begins to get rougher,
you can only hear one child now, and they're quieter, more distant,
they begin to break off and another track appears, they wind off into
the darkness, their own sings flutter in and out of existence between
your own. Your wife smiles, grips your hand tight and you mirror her.
The warm light is dimming slightly, the track rising again. You see a
peak on the horizon, its hard to make out between the hazy light, but
it's there. You can feel the rising track, your cart wobbles slightly
and you brace yourself. It gets closer and closer, a shining light
hangs just above it, perhaps its another level, another smooth track
awaits and light is beckoning. Your mind wanders through the sea of
possibilities, treading water and trying to remain calm above the
undertow. The peak arrives, it is a short plateau, behind which lies
a darkness more profound and vast than any you have seen thus far.
Pockets of light dot it, time begins to slow as you approach the
apex. Your heart races, your hands sweat and your grip tightens. Your
wife holds yours tight, she feigns a smile but shuts her eyes, you do
too.

You open yours eyes, the darkness is around you. You breath it in and
feel the coldness seep through your lungs and into your heart. It
warps its icy tendrils around and holds your breath for a second.
Your wife grips tighter, her warmth fighting against the coming
darkness, you can see it, and her, through the sparse flickering
lanterns along the track. Your children come to visit, they bring
children of their own and for a time, you can feel the warmth return,
the air becomes thinner and easier to breath. Your mind clears a
little and the light grows stronger. You can see a bit farther ahead,
some more peaks and troughs, small, insignificant. The track levels
out again, it's declining slowly, but you can feel it straighten.

All around you, the other tracks that you could see before have
become lost in the darkness, it slowly arrives, seeping through the
air imperceptibly. You try to catch it moving, but with each new
blink it takes another person, another memory, with it. The track is
rickety here, it bumps and swells and rattles underneath the cart.
Something about the air smells damp and cold, its faint but caustic
almost. Your nostrils try and adjust, you can't tell if it's truly
there or just your imagination. Your hand is cold again. You lift
your eyes to find the seat next to you empty. It's leather worn, torn
and broken in many places. A spring shows though the crease, the
colour faded to grey. The handles and rails beside are worn, a
hand-shaped groove rests in the metal, a single hair sways gently in
the soft breeze, all of its colour lost too, as if the whole world
had been bleached before your eyes. Your heart feels cold again, the
icy tendrils hold your heart once more. Your breath begins to wan and
your eyes are heavier.

You take one last look around, the cart is slowing, the lights have
all been extinguished and the seats are all empty. The darkness has
encased you in its miasmal depths, the frozen air invading your very
being. Every laboured breath feels shallower, somehow hollow. The
rides are all gone, the ticket-man has gone home, the breaks on your
cart squeak softly in the darkness as you come to a halt. You sit
there, eyes heavy, limbs stuck to your sides. Your cart is cold and
dusty, the leather rotted away, the wood broken down and the metal
corroded to a colourless powder. Sitting alone, in your darkness, you
feel your mind begin to wander and escape. The park is closed, the
people all gone, but alone you sit amongst the empty fluorescent
tubes and decaying tracks. Memories of your life scattered about your
feet. It's cold here, you lay down. Your limbs are cold and the rest of your body follow suit. Effortlessly, the final breath of darkness
swallows you whole.