Museum “The Red Planet”

“The third planet from the sun is Earth. The fourth is Mars.

Earth is primarily defined by blues and greens, sometimes a bit of brown or yellow, but Mars is dominated by the color of red. Rust and dust baked under years of cold and bitter, shameful cosmic expulsions. These things are true.

And in the order of information, those things are true.

What is lost is the why.

And you may figure that the why is part of another set of questions, ones involving atmosphere and climate, rotation and seasons, and most of all the presences of water in all of its forms. And in that you would again be right.

But only partially.

In logic, things can be true, and they can be valid, and they can be one and they can be another. Truth is objectively accurate. A valid statement simply requires that is is proceeded by its proper form. And so I could say that the Earth is the fifth planet from the sun. Then, I could assert that the red planet is further out from the sun than earth, but closer than the red eye. And then I could conclude that the red planet is the sixth planet.

And that would be valid, because though it is factually false, it is logically sound.

That is the way of many things in the universe, and really the only reason we accept one thing as truth and the other as blasphemy, is because we have information that tells us otherwise. And far be it from me to suggest that objective truth is not real. That causes all sorts of problems.

That spreads all sorts of lies that we pretend are opinion or simply an anecdote.

What I am getting at, what I am really getting at, is that there are things that are true and that are false, and that one thought can logically lead into another. But all of that, all of that wonderful classifiers are valuable to a form of knowledge that can be seen as the most important of all.

What is true and what is false.

You take a life, and you create a body. Was it right or wrong to do so? That can be argued. But here is still a body, and you are still a creator of a body. A dead body.

So you kill, and you create a body. Easy sequence. Only it isn't.

Not if you are looking at it the right way.

Not if you are looking for the right thing.

You take action, a force is imparted upon the means, and the persons body reacts to that force with a reaction of its own. And you understand that force. You understand the properties of momentum and of friction. But you don't understand that other part.

The why.

Why is the friction applied, and why does the body react to it like it does. Why are there bugs ready and waiting to begin eating the newly made body, and why didn't you think to call the police?

There is a reason...in a sense.

A thing lurking between the lines. Like the reduction of matter down to particles, down to elements, down to atoms. So too are statements broken down into cause and effect. You break it down enough, and you find all sorts of strange and absurd conclusions.

But more to the point, you see fingerprints.

I don't know why this is like this, why it is built into everything.

The farther you go from truth, the longer you seek out whether or not something is or isn't, was or wasn't, could or couldn't, the more you see the fingerprints within the designs. And when you look for that...it tells you something.

Mars is the fifth planet from the sun. But that only became true a little while ago.”

It is raining again.

It is raining harder than I have seen it rain in some time. Even during the one rain, when I danced with my mother under the light of a gray sky, even then it did not rain like this.

It did not hail. It was cold, but I could not feel it on my skin.

Today I can feel the rain, feel the cold of it running off my fingers as I let my arm rest against the lip of the apartment window. I have wrapped myself in a blanket, keeping the cold from reaching me, but I feel the rain running off my hand and a chill runs up my spine.

Not a chill of cold.

I am not cold.

The rain holds promises.

Ones I intend to make it keep.

There is a cat. I let it come inside. What really can be done to me after everything that I have lost?

Everything I thought was there is gone.

Everything I took as a constant no longer exists like that. All the connections, all the reprieves from all the feelings of shame and pain...they were just that. They were moments when things were able to come to rest.

And rest they will, six feet below where I cannot reach them.

And those that linger are not living by any traditional sense.

Eyes following you around a room, though the body can't.

Living in rot.

I put it together today. I realized the why. And the why is terrible and awful, and I don't think people could ever truly start to understand all the things that go into it. And what gods may be have failed to offer any way to endure this new reality, though I know I have to try and fight.

Even if it hurts.

A planet orbits a star, through rotation exists as a new spherical form. Is large enough to create gravity, and to disturb the world around it. In all of this, this new form meets these definitions. But the why is where things get bad.

This thing is constrained, but only for a little while.

The ritual keeps it in place.

The fourth planet from the sun is not a planet. It is a thing that is and isn't. It is the dark. And the dark pollutes the world, even if it is supposed to be held in place. And when at last it is free, when the form no longer is that of a planet, all things will end.

It is written in the old records. The old stories that mention The Glow and Umbrklensky.

These things mention a dark.

And the dark is the end of all that is.

So everything becomes what isn't.