Throwback to 2014!

Gift raffle for JudeLion. His story behind this image:

On Dying Young in Anthem

The future has always been there, and every new generation has just come to visit it. Like immigrants clambering from a boat or a wave of sensationalism passing over the ubiquitous being of art, time is the same way. Such is the youth and revolt of a new generation, their ideals of difference and their desire to be unique. They charge forward into the future believing they are finding an entirely new path into the unknown of the temporal, but it’s all been done. The ideology of revolution and their control of the future are just a weather-beaten train station, and the world has been riding on a circular track as far as memory can serve.

We believed we were different. We wanted to derail. The new “movement of us” lived in Anthem, one of those new and isolated developments halfway between the airport and anywhere else. Anthem was a circle of green in a dirt field, a walled-in neighborhood for the well-to-do, an oasis. It was sunk into a valley, the roads curved down the hills to Anthem like it was the center of gravity, attracting all around it. Bright sports cars beetled in and out of its gates daily, the suited men and dressed housewives rode in their metal chariots and walked its right-angular sidewalks, yard sprinklers clicked and hissed on set hour intervals. The sun favored Anthem, and never a day went by when the neighborhood was fully domed with rain, or snowed in. Whether it was a meteorological miracle, or that Anthem was a living being with godhood in its veins and the power to control the weather, we never were sure. For all the world, Anthem could’ve been a monstrous beast with the pointed teeth of house roofs, gnashing upwards into its inexplicably clear sky, wielding uncontrollable power in the balled fists of its knotted hills, and we never would have known.

It was by no means a small space; indeed, Anthem could’ve been a standalone city for all its size. Row upon row of homes, all eerily identical in color scheme and shape, exploded outwards from the center of the place like spokes in a wheel. Cars crept between them on black ribbons, the drivers navigating the duplicate streets with no effort. We had endless green fields of parks in which to run and play, we had big backyards to hold faux courts and dungeon raids. Trees were present so we could learn how to climb. We grew up there, we knew its streets and we traversed them like we were swimming through the bloodstreams of its asphalt veins. We familiarized ourselves with the mazes of storm drains and the perpetual construction developments. And as long as we were there, nothing outside its walls changed. The brown dirt remained staked by companies vying for control to decide what they could turn it into—a Midas touch of a shopping mall or a big corporate complex. Nothing came to fruition and we watched as the dirt baked in the sun or melted into mud in the rain. But we liked it that way. We liked living on the island of Anthem.

Granted, nothing inside its walls changed, either, even for the souls that swarmed around, bees in the symmetrical hive. As far as we were concerned, we were the only dynamic characters within—the has-beens and parents would remain a perpetuality in their confined selves, stern and uninteresting. But we, oh yes, we were the ones changing. We grew into ourselves, we became individuals bursting with bright colors and screamingly loud actions. We were centers of our own webs and we spread out. We moved from the hemisphere of childhood into that of responsibility and shirking it. Naptimes became opportunities to sneak out of the house, the games of the green lawns and fields of Anthem became an anachronism. Now, we grappled with middle school drama, hormones, shy kisses and the ripping frustrations of the space between youth and life in Anthem. An entire world, an entire universe within the walls of the development. Had you knocked down Anthem’s barriers, the world would’ve been flattened by our lives, our macrocosmic bursts of energy. Thousands of souls and thousands of stories, all glowing and incubating within our host mother Anthem.

When we hit the barrier of 18, we changed even more drastically, but Anthem was always comfortingly familiar. It only watched, stoically unchanging, as we dragged ourselves out of bed every morning to crack tabs on energy drinks and alcohol, to get to our clunkers and hand-me-down automobiles and drive to work and pound our hands on the wheel to the drumbeat of our favorite songs. We loomed over registers like manic angels of service retribution while the world, familiarized with the customer side of the counter, lined up to have their endgames handed to them in plastic bags. We shrank from the daylight as it only heralded the poorer things in life, things like responsibility and work and classes. No longer did we walk the straight green streets of Anthem, we hurried into our cloned homes and retreated into dim and air-conditioned teenage solitude.

But when night fell, we ruled Anthem. Our cars would be our chariots of vengeance as we enacted our brimming vitality upon the rigid picket fences of Anthem. We burned bright as we took to the streets in Chuck Taylors and low-slung Levis stained with paint and grease. We took batter-up swings out of windows at our targets of mailboxes, we ran laughing through dark gaps between homes as red and blue flashed behind us. We shook the clacking cans of paint in our hands as we climbed onto each other’s shoulders to reach a particularly enticing piece of blank wall. We reclined in the cold and dewy grass, picking out our own constellations, watching milky white pot smoke blossom up to the sky and stuffing our faces with bag fries. These are the times we cherished most, and we could feel like we seized the night when we climbed back through the window into one of our basements to immediately pass out, fully clothed, on sofas and armchairs. Sometimes I’d end up in the backseat of a car with somebody temporally special to me, our breath fogging the windows and my teeth hungrily finding his lips as he gently pushed back and forth, the soft angle of his back sloping above me, glowing gently in glass-filtered moonlight. Drugs, fast food, mischief and sex were our Bible. Our Commandments only numbered one: To do whatever the fuck we wanted.

We had a water tower at the top of a hill in the middle of the development, a metaphorical tree of life, a white metal mushroom cloud visible from wherever one stood inside of Anthem’s gates. This was our throne, our grassy palace from which we could look out over all we surveyed. We were the sovereign kings and queens of Anthem; we stood unopposed. It was the panoptic ideal, we could stand atop the hill and twirl in circles, laughing, throwing our hands wide and spreading our fingers through the evening air, and gazed upon our kingdom of Anthem. Ironically, the highest point in Anthem was only equal to the edges of the valley in which the neighborhood sat; the highest we could climb was just to escape the pitfall of the American Dream. So together we would stand atop the hill of the water tower, one small group allied against the world, our hands linked beneath the starry heavens as we screamed promises to never change, to remain friends for the entirety of our short lives, to finally go on that roadtrip to California.

We never wanted to change because nobody could duplicate what we provided each other. We were young. We laughed and we cried and we smoked and we fucked. We were young, and we were dying in the imperfectly perfect cradle of Anthem.
One by one our slow wasting away came to a definitive, sudden stop. Whether it was some kind of unspoken, universal pact, or just crazy happenstance, we died. It may have been some kind of overdose or a car accident—death’s metaphorical list certainly wasn’t picky in its choices—but we dropped off the green face of Anthem. All of us would admit that it was almost welcome—a welcome change from Anthem, a sudden killswitch before we got to be like the ones that we resisted, before we got any older and couldn’t enjoy things anymore. There wasn’t any way to stop the flow of time to could cram in everything we wanted and needed to do. The only option we had, intentional or not, was to get out of Anthem before it got too late. Anthem, our home for so long, our green and symmetrical nurturing mother, had now become a symbol of our own downfall, a harbinger for our slide into the roles of our parents, with their mid-life crises and unfulfilled dreams.

We still believed ourselves to be different, and we enforced that through our own endings.

And there will certainly come a time when the next group of children comes to inhabit Anthem, and they will tread in our invisible footsteps without knowing it. They will try to be different, but it’s all been done before.

Rest assured that we will not be there to witness them.

We will be gone, we will have died young in Anthem.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Characters (c) http://furaffinity.net/user/shmagaman

Art (c)