Night Sky

As always night finds me looking up. No matter where I end up in this desolate place I repeat the hopeless ritual, straining as always for a fleeting glimpse. I’m not even sure when I started to do it. I think maybe it has something to do with hope, though there is precious little of that left in the world.

But then who can blame those of us that survive for feeling that way? Surely not the dead. They had it far easier than those that survived. Living one minute, then erased from being the next. While their loss was tragic, they never suffered like the survivors have. Fighting to make it through another day, and for what? The chance to do it all over again tomorrow? Yes hope is hard to find.

God knows what the date is. Nobody in my group can remember time, and the days have blended together into a never-ending routine. Up in the morning and moving soon as possible looking for food and necessities. Hoping that there is enough to go round to keep the group alive another day. No laughter, no warmth, just trying to make it till the next morning when it starts all over.

No one understands why I volunteer to take night watch, but it is the one time of my day when I can stop and remember. I look out over the dark landscape and recall it wasn’t always that way. There was a time when our electricity lit the night, so much in fact that we had trouble seeing the stars. I guess that proved to be our biggest failure. Not that knowing what was heading our way would have helped much.

Years of worry about nuclear war and in the end most of the human race gets wiped out by a rock the size of New York city. I’m sure there is some kind of irony there though I can’t think of it. When the sky darkened mankind knew it was in trouble. When the animals and crops started to die many gave up.  But nature will always go on, and those of us that could adapt learnt to survive. Those who couldn’t, well I don’t like to think about that.

Still, something keeps me out here each night looking up. Perhaps its the warmth that I feel in the wind these days or that we now see more animals. This global winter can’t last forever can it? The clouds will have to start to break up someday and that is what I keep watch for. A reason to hope again, a reason to do more than just survive, a reason to laugh.

Sighing I close my eyes and feel the wind play across my face. I silently will the clouds to part and give me my proof.  Opening my eyes again I look skyward once more, and there in a small break in the clouds I see the moon.