Welcome to My Utopia!

Those familiar with the title will know it from the RCS Essay Competition, 2010. I wrote this piece back then; it has borne little editing since, but I hope it is enjoyable nevertheless.

12th June 2198

 

I know I deceive myself in writing this. Just as the stone towers around me have crumbled to dust, this page of text will eventually be consumed by microbes more potent than creatures a million times larger. Still I write, for the infinitesimal chance that it will be found before it is gone.

 

Inside me is pain--pain, like a malignant crab, easing claws through my systems, tightening nerve and vein. This is the last leg; the future blurs even now. Tonight, I will offer my soul to the cosmos. Tonight, a young woman will complete the sonnet of her life, and give up her last breath for a thousand new poems to begin.

 

For though I will die, I will never truly cease to exist. My body will feed a few generations of bacteria, a bloom of fungus--and they, in turn, will be food for another dynasty. The wheel continues to turn, and I am an inextricable part of it.

I have, however, been offered a small mercy: lucidity. Thus begins the very last monologue of my life. I am no stranger to monologues; they are the only conversations I have ever made.

Around me tension strings the grey edges of the sky together. The wind is fraught with static. Heaven has drawn its curtains, and storm stirs the dead vine banners far away. No doubt, it is already raining in my hometown, Lenora.

 

Ah, Lenora. Do I miss you?

 

The world is nothing short of amazing; Lenora is testament to that. During the course of my life, it has been surgically altered a million times over. Each operation only good, it seems--knowledge, technology, hope for generations once believed to be lost. Life has learnt to manufacture itself: right this very moment, scientists in faraway Lenora are engineering and arranging amino acids in laboratories, creating life with gloved hands. They are magicians performing beneath the whitewash spotlight, the eyes of the world scrutinising their every gesture.

 

Their spotlights: the laboratory lamps. They dazzle me, though they are twenty miles away--electric angels that brought heaven to humankind, that lifted us to the pedestal of God. Within those sterile rooms, we learnt to be immortal. We synthesised panacea, mechanised biorhythms, learnt to rewind deterioration.

One can now buy death in a syringe. “Death”: five seconds of numbness, and oblivion thereafter.

 

It was a day a hundred and fifty years ago that the table was prepared for the operation, all notes taken, all tools sterilised. It was the day that Lenora--christened “City of God”--opened its gates.

Dusty, dingy, poverty-stricken Akela--I'd called her home for twenty barren years. Famished life in the shadow of a nuclear disaster had reduced us all to skeletons, too dry to shed tears, and by then we'd given ourselves to that fate. Lenora XXVII hadn't.

 

“The city of Lenora will be opened for habitation on the 21st of April, 2043.”

 

The day these words soared over the airwaves to our little town, Akela was swept by fever delirium. That night, we threw parties, drank till 4 a.m., slept fitfully. The next mornings were full of cheers and packing, goodbyes and good riddances. We commenced our pilgrimage towards this Promised Land--leaving our barren soil, our bricks, our histories behind.

 

“Welcome to my Utopia!”

 

She chose these four words to proclaim, as the gates to her white city swung wide open. I roared with the crowds, raised my fist with them. I was sure this was my every dream realised.

Like rumples smoothed out of a blanket, our inconveniences left no trace. Existence became swift and flawless, for science dealt its hand in everything--recreation, health, sheer subsistence. The world ran like a machine on divine clockwork. It was the heaven it had been made out to be. The world had only just begun; I was still a child in the Brilliance of the City. I remember the soft old couch in the lounge, remember sipping from a can of tea late at night, listening to my hostel mates hit the repeat button and kick back for another screening of the opening ceremony--night in, night out.

 

Lenora’s most famous words thus ingrained themselves in my mind. I still hear phantom echoes of them: “Welcome to my Utopia!”

 

I am not there, not any longer. In fact the things in my vicinity bear no resemblance to that world. The remains of a coffee table are scattered at my feet, woodlice scurrying in the rot, and the corner window glows with storm light. Resting on my lap is the frame of a precious old harp, on which I learnt a folk tune as a child: I begin to play from that rusting memory.

 

Answering my clumsy tune, the sky thunders. The lightning is jagged in the window, where wild tendrils gnarl and snag on what we were once proud to call civilisation. Akela, civilisation? We joke about it now, my hostel mates and I. There are weeds where the carpet used to lie; there is dust on the mantel where the ornaments once stood. Wood pieces like that aren't allowed in Lenora. In Lenora, everything is inorganic, and everything serves a purpose. In Lenora, Lenora--

 

--Lenora was beauty once. Lenora was heaven, where old problems were discarded, obliterated by a comforting swirl of white, a cold blanket, a murky syringe. But perfection poisoned her heart; perfection ate the beauty away. Pale skyscrapers engulfed the roads. Factory blocks sprang up like weeds. The maiden became a gnarled witch, frosty and heartless, bitter with pride.

 

One day as Lenora fell through the heavens, I glimpsed the city skyline through a gap between our hostel blocks. Where clouds once lazily rolled, glittering buildings now clawed at the sun, flinging shadows across the city--tyrants asserting their authority.

“Welcome to my Utopia!”  Lenora XXVII’s jubilant voice flooded the cracks of my heart, as I gazed out beyond.

 

They say the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. I began to understand. The instant I was welcomed into heaven, I began to miss the evils of the earth. Weren’t those the very evils that once chased us out?

I lay sleepless that night, holding an old postcard up to my plasma beside lamp. As my eyes crossed the washed-out photograph of the ocean, a memory suddenly moved deep in me--of something that had been wrenched from my grasp a hundred and fifty years ago.

 

Dear Eva,

How has your life been?

 

I blinked at those words, those pictures imprisoned in time--and for a second, I tasted loss--piercing, bitter.

There is a terrace house on the slopes of southern Akela, where the sky is bluer than the sea. It brims with songs waiting to be sung again, on a broken harp lying in shadows that once knew the fingers of a child, a sweet wind sweeping through lace curtains.

 

I left on a lone expedition five days ago, in search of that perfect sky. I went the old highways, saw the blooming of an old mushroom cloud in staticky memory, there beyond the hills. There my body succumbed to the viruses it was never allowed to acquaint itself with.

 

I found myself confused, as I stumbled at last up my front steps, and sank to join the rot shadow of my old living room. Why refuse the perfection of the City of God, I asked myself. Why, for a broken, rot-riddled dump?

 

I think I regret it not.

Though the sky here has long faded to monochrome, I swear I still see little patches of vibrant ocean cerulean scattered across heaven. I am home again--home, where I spent spring mornings in the dewy grass; home, where I drew the curtains wide, welcoming summer into my room; home, where I flew through rain cocooning myself in useless wool.

 

Home, my reader. Is it not worth forgoing perfection, to be where I am now?

 

I think now upon my hostel mates back in Lenora, eyes riveted to a glowing screen in the lounge. The thought makes me smile. They can survive in their clockwork world, impervious to death and disease. They can sleep in suspension, love machines, walk within cages of light.

 

Look around you now. Look at the vines in the window, the roots shattering the roads, the fallen towers. They are so queer, so magical, in the shadowed rain. Don’t you think so?

 

This is the perfect world, reader. The wild dream. Welcome to my Utopia.

 

"Dear Eva,

How has your life been?”

 

My life…has been amazing. I leave it now, with no regrets.

 

I know full well that I could have taken a one-way trip to the clinic, taken a jab to die. I am aware that my existence could have concluded in five seconds of numbness, not in this drawn-out agony. But that would be the defeat of mankind and life as it is.

I won't take death from a chemical in my blood. I won't give my body to ruthless sublimation in a laboratory for hygiene purposes.

I want to die the way my ancestors died, the way we were meant to die. I want to return myself to the rich soil of life, to the breath of eternity, to the foundations of the sky.

 

I want to keep the wheel turning.

 

It is time, I can feel it. In the air, I smell the distant scent of fresh rain--a scent that tells me that the storm has ended, and that the little blue fragments of sky are blooming overhead.

 

Fare you well, dearest reader; thank you for sharing these minutes of your life with me. And do not mourn my passing--for though I have died, I will never truly cease to exist.

 

Yours truly,

Eva Wren.

Author's Note

An old piece, so criticism might not be as helpful.