When Things Fall Apart and Come Back Together OR: If I Knew What It Was to Live After the Seas Flooded Manhattan
by Georgia McCandlish

In my new populace we are perfect, but the earth still dies.

In my new populace everyone is issued a bicycle and a water bottle. A single high speed railroad operates between all major metropoli. We all live in group-housed earthships. But in my new populace we are still each a little whirlwind of thoughts ready to take the world by a storm, grasping at the technology, never still always racing forward. We still love like the advancement of human society, like the destruction of natural and primitive instinct. We still bow under the creature feeling, Otto and Eliade’s mysterium tremendum pressing at the back of our sinuses. In my new populace we are a myriad of new industrial revolutions, in which each old powerhouse and smokestack that blackened the winter sky is a new beginning and each dawn is just an old solution.

A new civilization is like a first love. That fizzy feeling in your stomach is like bombs dropping, going off one by one to break the walls and dissipate the acrid black smoke. All we’ve got is our post-apocalyptic resilience, our pre-utopic visions. All we’ve got is the way the jagged pieces of our strong hold are silhouetted in the sky and the way our bits of heart tissues glisten, red and raw. All we’ve got is the Cuyahoga River burning for days on end and the wondrous explosions of supernovas and demigods above our heads. The earth always seemed like that first love speeding to a fiery catastrophic end, a relationship that ends in break up or death that widows us all. In my new populace all we’ve got is each other.

In my new populace we will not kill animals for food and we will grow our crops aligned with the contours of the land. We will do everything right. In my new populace we will construct a life around building our communities. We will teach our children our expertise. We will teach our children the things we have come to know about the people and the land. We will teach them how to read the classics and how to draw stars. Every child will be raised by the parents, the village and the rain. We will teach our children our greatest truth: that living is feeling a strange-complicated mixture of melancholy and love. That we feel it in our intimately related bones and are connected through them regardless of flesh. They will know equality. In my new populace we will devote our lives to the construction of a transient world for our children to live in, to the fostering of communities based on respect, honesty and trust. In my new populace we will not bargain our trust. In my new populace, all we’ve got is love. All we’ve got uncertainty. All we’ve got is stop gaps. All we’ve got is new beginnings and old solutions. All we've got is comets, is the universe, is each other.

So,

everyone is issued a bicycle and
a water bottle.


Georgia is a college student in living sporadically in St. Louis, MO and Washington D.C. She writes things sometimes and makes a lot of art which can be found over at georgiacosmo.tumblr.com.