Museum of No Importance: Episode 6 - Last Week's Tomorrow
Last Week's tomorrow:
The halls are vast and calm,
And the sounds are mostly empty, ignorable.
I've not seen another person in a couple of hours
And the only way I remember their existence
is the occasional cough
or sneeze leaking
down the long broad corridors.
Here in this room I can be whomever I wish.
Nobody will ever tell me any differently.
In these two hours, I crafted a whole persona.
Who Am I really? It is immaterial.
I am who I decide to be
until the nurse returns
to tell me differently.
I am a wounded soldier of the Glameri Empire,
Wounded in person and in mind
And now this sterile palace is my place of healing.
It's not a lie. It's my best guess.
I don't remember where these bullet wounds came from,
But I remember the nurse telling me stories about the war.
We defeated them, the Empire of the market towns,
the merchants who can never have enough
The ones who insist and insist on how to live.
We won, and now I'm here with my fractured memories.
I do remember the war, but it comes here and there, now and then,
in a shower of gunsmoke and a hail of shrapnel.
I remember the booming explosions that came from above
like the sneezes that echo around
these cavernous passageways.
I look at the shadow my hand casts beneath this spotlight,
And I see the shapes of soldiers
stumbling through the mist towards us.
I see these high cream walls,
and I remember a hospital with streaks of blood.
I look at my bandaged leg,
and I see a defeated army dragging itself to safety.
But the nurses tell me we are the winners.
I hear the high insistent whine of the alarm,
And I hear the enemy
I hear bells in a market town.
I hear familiar voices laughing and chatting.
I hear
I hear you calling to me
I smell your perfume and feel your kiss on my cheek
I feel your soft hands squeezing hard on my army jacket.
I feel you slipping away from me
into a valley of fire and fear
into a viscous immeasurable sleep
Into a general anaesthetic
I hear the bells, the bells of my hometown
The bells of my real hometown.
I look around me at the prison of these walls
And the stale air
And the trolley that seemed mundane
Now malign and alien
Enemies all around
I miss the bells of a former life
A life that I can hear when I am alone
And a life that no longer exists,
A life they have taken
A life they have erased from my mind
And replaced with a new life
A sterile life of whining klaxons
And cream walls
And irresolute dreams
And unknown faces
And indistinct memories
And stolen memories
And new memories fading into the void of a vanquished foe.
Let me out
Let me out
Let me out! I want to go home!
