The train zipped past him and stopped, gates opened and some people got off while others, including him, got on. He just wanted to ride somewhere, anywhere. The train took off with great speed driving through the city, then suburbs until finally entering darkness of unlit fields and forests. From time to time it zipped past smaller towns. He tried to catch the fleeing moments of how life went on in those places questioning if through the brief glimpses from the speeding train he can truly imagine their provincial existence.

A woman cried distracting him from probing this question further. Her dog has collapsed. People looked in her direction. Someone got closer bending over the animal trying to see if something can be done. He wanted to walk away even though his curiosity wanted to know more. The train was still moving and there was nowhere to run. Through people’s conversations he pieced together the story. The dog had some kind of terminal disease and it was given maximum two weeks to live. The woman was taking the dog to see her family and on the way it lost consciousness. Nobody knew what do do next, people aimlessly looked up answers on their screens. The woman kept massaging dog’s body to warm him up as the animal laid motionless on the train’s floor with its tongue sticking out touching the dirty floor. He instantaneously developed a strange affinity for this animal: he was to take off tomorrow and be gone, the dog’s journey towards the end started today. He looked in its open empty eyes remembering the time he kissed a dead body of his mother. He leaned forward and his warm lips met hers cold forehead. A jolt of shock permanated his body because he wasn’t prepared to comprehend that he wasn’t kissing a human being. That body still looked like a human but whatever constituted this human, call it a soul or whatever, was gone. His lips trembled in fear. He was old enough to understand death and yet it wasn’t the fear of dying that filled him with dread. It was the duality of being: body as body and non-body. Body defining that human still was and yet that human already was not. He couldn’t comprehends how those two states of being could co-exist in this world. He felt like that computer that broke down on the way to the planet Kaii.

The woman keep on crying complaining of her veterinarian’s misdiagnosis: the dog was supposed to be alive for two more weeks. He wondered if the dog kept on living for the next two weeks, would it lessen her pain? What if the doctor predicted two years instead of two weeks? The immediacy of death brought about by the disease made the natural event of the end more apparent. We are all marching towards the edge of abyss but don’t pay much attention to that moment. We only care about the end if faced with its immediacy. Life’s timeline is marked and we are forced to pay attention as calculating machines converting everything into value systems. A pleasant vacation on some tropical island that lasts two weeks differs from that which lasts two years. Those timestamps change perception: the immediacy of return to daily normalcy in one case; in other, the prison of the paradise.

The train pulled into a train station and when the door opened, he’s left the car. He walked down the station’s platform further away from the dead dog. Short distance away he was surrounded by people oblivious to the drama happening just a few cars behind. He stood on the platform not knowing where to go next. Should he go back? He’s received a message from the Mission Commander – he knew of the Poet’s absence. He was sure they could find him very quickly despite the disguise – after all he only cared to fool people not the facial recognition of surveillance cameras. He broke the protocol by heading out, if he return now it will seem that he can be easily controlled. What could he do, he wondered, kick him off the mission the night before the take off? Although he insisted on immediate return, the Mission Commander understood that pressing the point further was fruitless. Realising that he’s only 600 miles away from his father’s house – he decided to visit him as the ride should take less than twenty minutes. They’ve already said good-bys but he didn’t think the father would mind this late-night unannounced visit. Both couldn’t sleep, often falling asleep only around morning – and then only for a few hours. Within five minutes, he was on the train heading to see him.

As the landscape moved behind the windows he kept thinking about the dog. Projecting the immediacy of the experience and merging it with his own, he thought of his girlfriend’s dog. An attractive animal that he didn’t like because it was too attached to its subordinate position. He’s watched it with contempt as each time in preparation for its daily walk it grabbed the leash and carried it around the entrance as if to let everyone know its pride at being told what to do. There was no reason for him to feel joy in its slavery and yet it did. He had contempt for its acceptance of this fate because he hates creatures that accept the unjust structures of the world. Passing a tree the dog would smell a scent and pull on the leash desiring to get closer to inspect it further. He’s never let him. Those outbursts of freedom were so pathetic that he took an intense pleasure in denying it those sniffs. He would pull on the collar and it  had no choice but give in to his command directing it to keep away. He would look in its eyes, and its face was filed with trust. This look made him charming and despicable. Those seemingly innocent trusting eyes were not of a creature that prides itself on giving trust but rather those eyes belonged to an animal that tossed his faith in hands of others, his hands. The eyes weren’t honest but rather filed with fear at what his powers might bring. It was powerless out of its own choice.

An overlooked growth on the dog’s chest forced a visit to a doctor. The Poet joked that the dog will die within months due to its old age. The doctor confirmed that it had a tumor which has spread to lungs, engulfing heart and was attacking the liver. He predicted death in just a few weeks bringing the Poet’s jokes about death from the security of fiction into tumultuous of reality. Tears danced in the Poet’s eyes. If he didn’t care about this dog to justify this emotional outburst, why was he crying? As a joke – even if based on facts – he dealt with fiction. His tears were result of being forced to face finality. Besides his mother, he never experienced anyone’s death even though the training prepared them for this eventuality. Death didn’t terrify him: you are alive and then you are not. This progression of events is natural not only to animals and humans but even to planets, star systems, galaxies and probably even time itself. We live with full knowledge of beginning and the end but as long as this knowledge is kept away from our conscious psyche – we are comfortable in the delusion of non-mortality. Probably it’s only through that delusion that we can leave bed every morning. With the rising sun, instead of succumbing to the desperation of a certain death we keep on going. We forget that the very energy that gives our planet life, makes the Sun come closer to its own destruction. With each life-giving beam of sunshine, the Sun burns up. We go about the day, we talk to others exchanging ideas, we fall in love, we enjoy art, we enjoy food, we look toward the dying Sun – unconcern about its fate – as it sets in the evening, we hold our old father’s hand keeping away gloomy thoughts about his upcoming end… We live running away from facts. Only rarely are we confronted by truth and it’s in that confrontation that gloom of living overcomes us. Aware of time’s existence, in the confrontation we become terrified of it. The mind, that can subvert time by flying towards conceptual infinities, succumbs to time’s ruthless dominance over body. We realise that mind’s control over body is only temporal – that often body controls the mind by limiting mind’s possibility to function abstractly outside of physicality of the body. With body’s end, mind’s exploration of the infinities is over. To suppress body’s control, mind creates hierarchies of impact. Within that structure, dog’s death in two years doesn’t produce the same shock as in two weeks. Both time periods end with dog’s end but one is devoid of necessity to deal with the concept now. Unless directly confronted, we don’t often think about death. Is it even possible to imagine death? Can one ever overcome their “beingness”? Tomorrow at this hour he will be no more – either asleep or dead – erased from the immediate existence of now. He sympathizes with the B-team, the nine astronauts who will stay behind, imagining their horrors they will no doubt experience psychologically. They, the ones who go, will have no other way but go. They’ll be in space, already far away from Home – each passing mile lessening the pain of separation and wrapping their emotions in a cocoon of relative indifference. Them, still on Earth, having to say goodbye to their close ones at some space base feet away from outside reality.

In his rare moments of peace while walking the dog he looked to the stars. Often he looked towards the Orion constellation and imagined himself on that distant star’s planet. This imaginary journey took milliseconds while the real one will take 182 years one way. His family, his friend, his memory, his reality – all will be gone. Walking his dog he watched as it mindlessly walked in circles getting ready to defecate, sometimes stepping into chunks of some other dog’s dried out waste The dog had zero awareness that this crumbling material under its feet is the very same unwanted substance it was about to release. This infused him with more hatred for the dog – each time he saw its mindless lack of awareness, he hated him more. He thought of his mother who always called animals “God’s creatures.” Can this mindless dog stepping in shit be of God? He imagined omnipresent ever-engulfing soul and questioned if dog, or any animals for that matter, can posses soul. It seems they all living within soul – but don’t have direct access to it. To have soul is to be aware – aware of the soul and how one’s actions change the universe through that soul. Without awareness – there is no conscious change. Beings live out their time unaware how their actions adjust spiritual molecules of the universe. Through the ignorance of their own power, like the dog, they willingly let themselves be manipulated forever staying impotent. Taking this presupposition to a logical extreme, one could claim that many people are not fully human as despite possibility of them affecting the universe through their awareness, they remain oblivious of that possibility thus affecting nothing. In one universe that isn’t concerned with meta-changes – everyone is human. In another universe where meta-changes are important, only those with self awareness complex enough to comprehend their own value to the universe deserve that label. In that stratified version of the universe, the self-awareness is confronted by value of one’s actions. He looked around at the people in the train – how many of those surrounding him would fail the test… Would “he” pass it?

He was afraid that the moment we take soul away from dogs we’ll excuse our brutality towards animals and the same can be said of humans. He was afraid of this thought and this, maybe oversimplified, correlation because the implications of condemning many people into non-human category frightened him. History is awash with examples – the moment we take human qualities from the others, they become easy pray for our violent impulses. It seems it’s one of those true thoughts that are meant to forever stay locked in some vault only accessible for the intellectual elites that can both understand the issue AND its ramifications thus forced to create a fictitious version of the world. The knowledge by itself conceals the truth. The facts are almost inconsequential because the awareness is not there. At the same time the awareness of this truth causes the horror because one knows that the soulless masses can destroy other humans whether there is a soul or not. Truth must forever stay hidden keeping the masses placated with uplifting slogans.