Writer: Avjin Aktop
“Mama, why are people running?”
These are the words still echoing in my brain all over again after decades. And my highly developed subconscious— at least this is what I was hearing the days my psychologist mother talked to her patients before that happened— play me tricks night after night. Sometimes I wake up on my own in woods neighboring a clean water spout for which my husband and boys fought for a long time. And in the remaining time, I am woken up by my first daughter Eliza who, I suppose, will turn 13 when the river overflows.
But nightmares never end.
I hope not.
Although they are thoroughly non-disturbing, nightmares also have the ability to oblige me with what I have now, what I eat now, and mostly how I live my life now. I survived all these years on my own, I have seen the collapse of what we call technology, as a civilization tool and as the civilization itself. I have seen people starving from not knowing what to eat in the burned forests, and I have seen adolescents shivering in the dark both from the terror of the night and the newly-realized darkness distilled deep through their souls. I have seen survivors collaborating to have better chances to maintain their well-being for more days and establish the very first stages of clans in modern terms, which I discovered after I barely read the book that I found when I was interested in what they have done to our Mother in my spare times when I took no part in picking up fruits or cleaning. Most importantly, I have seen Mother Earth feed people who cut the lungs of our Mother, threw away literally everything to the stomach of the Mother, causing other children of Mother to be wiped out, founded factories over factories, and was releasing very toxic gases which left the Mother sweaty and run out of breath. The Mother was right in doing whatever she has done. Not only was she our Mother but also all other living creatures and...she had to protect them. She also knew that a group of her human children was ruling over the others, forcing them to commit what they did not want to do, and could not cry out their voices due to the lack of an artifact called money which was the power in old people’s systems. She had to save them; yet, as clearly observed, she had to sacrifice some for others to live.
With the help of the nightmares, I remember the life before. And I remember the cruelty of people, specifically their assimilated humanism.
You may be sure that we will not repeat the mistakes that so-called modernists have made. Because history never repeats itself unless you do not derive lessons from failures.