LEDGER

Entry 002: P. Haven

There are some places man is not meant to go. That used to be the mantra of many religions, urging people to believe and not search for the truth only a god can know. Then we discovered medicine. We drastically increased our life span. We eradicated plagues that had the potential to wipe our world clean.

We became better. We went places we thought we couldn't go.

I know now that this warning, for man not to dabble in what he is not meant to dabble in, is not the sayings of old-fashioned, narrow-minded puritans. These are the words of prophets.

Someone saw this, someone has witnessed the horror of human perversion, of self-adoration so great that the divine means nothing before man. How can there be something more godly than man?

Someone probably heard me scream, wake up trying to claw my eyes out in the middle of the night, trying to get the tissue of the retina out of the way, reach deep and feel the gray matter behind.

It shouldn't feel foreign to the touch. The human brain is very soft, very malleable. Even if it's handled with the softest of pressure, fingers can leave indentations in the tissues. It wouldn't feel foreign to my bare fingers, it wouldn't hurt. The nerve cells in the gray matter have no pain receptors.

The prophets that heard me have gone back in time and tried to pull the emergency break of humanity, to stop it before it slowly but certainly creates something so disgusting, so other, yet so familiar.

So familiar. Like a first love of childhood returning years later. Like a first love becoming the only love. Like a broken windshield and crushed front of an Audi, smoke from the totaled engine melting the first, Christmas snow on the hideously smashed hood.

It's the familiarity that throws me off so much. Besides, the uncanny is just that, the familiar made strange. I have done this job since the moment I left Harvard, it's familiar. And suddenly, I am studying something I used to know, something I mourned and grieved over for an entire year before seeing it unearthed from its grave and reanimated, a sick reminder of what once was.

People keep reminders of things and events. They take pictures, make a collection of mementos, keep flowers between pages of a ledger in order to remember a certain day. They don't keep people.

I have a flower, a tiny branch of baby-breath in between the pages of the ledger I am writing in right now. But I also have the person from whose funeral I took the flower.

No, no, not a person. I have a corpse, a thing.

But I no longer want it, or what it represents. I want it back where it should be, in the grave with the name of my first love. My only love.