Day 1
My Love,
I’m not dead. I realize of course what a taboo that word is, but to say I’ve taken the “Grey Path” is, well, rife with implications and misunderstandings. I have taken the Grey Path—at least in the old meaning.
“The Old Meaning.” The disadvantage of our people is the shortness of memory. Our species has long suffered from that affliction, having been bred necessarily through an immediate preoccupation for survival. But how at odds with our beginnings is our future. The only way to advance the latter is to understand the past, and our short-term survival needs have always compromised these thoughts of advanced longevity. It isn’t fair, almost as if we’re constantly teetering on the brink of a higher understand we were never meant to achieve, only to be cast back to our basal form by higher powers.
But I’m rambling, and well do I remember the impatience in your eyes when I attempted these discussions. It isn’t your fault. I was always focussed on this philosophy, and you the needs of our family. Both were necessary, but I feel I’ve done you a disservice. Obviously having the energy to even expend on these thoughts is a luxury—impossible were it not for your constant vigilance to our collective. We are personifications of these aforementioned contradictions, codependent interlocutors which could not exist singly, for while the primal needs are most obvious, the higher goals alone served to allow the transition from villages to functional civilizations.
No doubt it was a form of this contradiction that caused the downfall—an inability to comprehend a world in which our survival instincts were not only no longer necessary, but a burden. Even the elders wouldn’t discount the evidence of the past, having used the relics to benefit our own. Were it not for the artifacts, our prosperity would have been hampered, limited to that of our competitors. Yet we feared to lose what we had found, and forbade seeking additions to that which kept us alive. Mere maintenance is insufficient, and prone to collapse. You know the council would never have sanctioned it, so I had to leave.
I know you’ll never forgive me were you to learn the truth, but know that I share the pain which I caused. To stay would have been a self-indulgence, and we all deserve more. Take care.
Liza