» Thu Aug 13, 2009 7:08 am Never has a person's life changed so much, in such a short period of time. It was high class living with not a care in the world. I wanted for nothing, and my only concerns were trivial in nature in contrast to the momentous, and far too numerous, concerns of today. "Trivial" does not even do justice to the comparison between then and now. Diminutive, evanescent, frivolous, immaterial, inappreciable, inconsequential, insignificant, irrelevant, meaningless, microscopic, minor, negligible, nonessential, nugatory, paltry, petty, piddling, puny, small, trifling, unimportant, valueless, worthless! What I wouldn't give to return to the times when my biggest concern was whether or not that girl liked me! Amata was her name... Anyway I digress. I was a resident of Vault-tec vault 101, then my world was turned upside down and I was chucked out into the wasteland. Or rather I escaped to the wasteland. And so began my current "adventure".
I had practically nothing. I had a pistol and a meagre amount of ammunition for it, but I had never fired a gun in my life! The closest I had ever come was firing the BB gun my dad got me for my birthday, so what use it would be to me I had no idea. I had a few other odds and ends but nothing really useful. I had no food, no water, nothing. I had the clothes on my back, the pistol in my hand, and a pocket full of bullets. I made my way out of the cave that the entrance to vault 101 was located in. At the end was a door and through cracks in the wood, light poured in. I gingerly pushed it open and any thoughts about survival were immediately blown out of my mind. The overwhelming light blinded me at first, but once my eyes adjusted...space, so much space. As far as I could see. The ground stretched out forever and ever it seemed until it hit the sky. Sky! I had never seen it before. I had spent my entire life in cramped corridors deep beneath the ground. I never had never seen the horizon, I had never seen the sky. It's a wonder I didn't collapse and succumb to instant and paralyzing agoraphobia. Awe, and wonder coursed through me; my heart pumped faster, sweat sprang out of every pore, I physically shook. It was the most intense experience I had ever felt. But it vanished so quickly. That warm glow of discovery was wiped out in an instant by horror and fear at what I saw. I had known it was called the wasteland but never in my wildest dreams had I expected something so visceral. Destruction in every direction, the broken frames of buildings poking out here and there, wrecked houses, rubble. Another thing that hit me was...grey. We had learnt about plants, and trees and grass in class back in the vault. We had learnt it was everywhere, especially grass, and that it fed off the rays of the sun. There was no grass, no plants, and only skeletal trees with no leaves. As for sunlight, the sickly yellow/white light that filtered through the clouds above was not heart warming or uplifting or any of the other words I had heard it described as in the various videos and films we were shown in the vault. I realised I had sunk to my knees and I was sitting in the dust on the ground. Shakily, I pulled myself up and hesitantly clambered down the slope to the broken road beneath me.
The ravaged detritus of civilisation lay littered in the road, left to rot for the two hundred years since the war that did this to the world. The burnt out carcasses of cars, shopping trolleys, chunks of masonry, charred skeletons, suitcases, a bicycle. I walked dazedly past them all, with a glazed look on my face. My mind was overloaded by what I was seeing, barely able to take in the harrowing sites surrounding me. I realise now that what I was seeing, was the remnants of people trying to flee. Fruitlessly. I wandered along, tripping in some of the cracks and rents in the road surface. It curved down the hill and came into what, I assume, used to be a village or town of some sort. I arrived at a central cross roads in the middle of the town. The shattered remains of the town that had, from a distance, promised shelter, up close proved that to be a downright lie and a fantasy. It was too much, I couldn't deal with it. My stressed mind became irrational, I was getting paranoid. Every sound had me turning around and staring feverishly for a source. I tired myself out, made myself dizzy. I collapsed in a quivering heap in the middle of those cross roads. I lay there, curled up in a ball hands over my face. The first thought that came into my head then was that I was going to die. The second was that I was tired. So tired. And then sleep became the overwhelming priority. My fatigued brain shut it all out, save the quest for sleep. I got up, as calm as you like, and walked into the remains of the nearest house. Absurdly I began looking for a bed to sleep. "Why where else do you sleep?" my burnt out brain reasoned. "Certainly not on the floor, that's cold and uncomfortable". Poking out of some rubble, I saw the corner of a bed frame. I pulled it out and even found the mattress underneath the rubble next to it. I laid it on the frame, carefully brushed all the dust off, then curled up and fell into the deepest sleep I have ever experienced. That was the best night's sleep I have ever experienced in the wasteland. The mind is a strange entity and you never quite know how it will react in extreme circumstances. At that time, my brain just tried to find a thread of normality, in a very abnormal situation. In that instance, the bed was that thread and it was this that I was focused on mind, body and soul. Leaving no room for anything else. I think it was that fixed thing, that normal, mundane, every day piece of furniture that kept my sanity tethered that day.
