ENTRY D
I thought maybe I had come too soon, but with no wife and no children I had no reason to delay. All I have of my old life is what I carried with me to this remote spot. So remote that none of the inevitable terror and confusion back in civilisation has managed to reach me at all.
If I didn't have this diary, I would've lost all track of the time I've been here. It's been months now. I thought more would've joined me, I expected a flood of people. What has become of them? I hope they didn't leave it too long before fleeing, I worry that no-one is left. There must be many places such as this, far enough away from the chaos. Perhaps things are better than I think.
When I look around at this spectacular landscape that has been home for so long, it is so hard to think that anything could be wrong so many miles away. There were things I thought I'd miss and find it hard to live without: electricity, running water, hot showers. But it's smaller things that this are hardest; I miss takeaway food most - eating is not so easy here!
At one time this place too would've been unsafe. There are no people here now, I wonder if there ever were? The whole area for hundreds of miles around was an active volcano range centuries ago, but now silenced. Maybe there were ancient villages here until an eruption, on the same biblical scale my world was facing, set their people to seek new lives elsewhere too.
I find myself thinking about my mother. She refused to leave home. Despite the danger, she wanted to stay. Immobile and resolute, she made me feel I was the only one who thought anything was wrong. Things she didn't understand were happening and I was unable to explain to her the consequences of the hammer finally falling.
Suddenly all the memories are crashing through my mind, the images swirl and ebb like waves of water breaking on the shore. What has become of everything that was before? How total was the destruction? I am immobilised where I stand to think of the terror of the actual moment it began; it will have started a chain of events of aftershock and meltdown we read about, but prayed would never happen. People of the 20th Century suddenly hurled into an alien world, unable to cope without all the things they were used to. I wonder how long it took for a semblance of normality to return, for emergency civil defence groups to become effective and re-establish services?
This rich land has sustained me. I love the mountains,, I love the clear, clean air, I love the peace but sometimes the calm of a new day begun in the early mist of dawn, and the stillness in the dusky colours of sunset is too steady, with not even a whisper on the wind to remind me that anyone else is left alive. I feel suddenly lonely.
It is surely time to find out what has become of the rest. To the mountains, who have been my friends for so long, I say farewell and thank you for your strong protection.
I sign this Jay Em and leave it with the last of my possessions. The battery ran out on my laptop computer the first day I used it, I knew it was useless to bring it with no power to recharge it, but it's so much a reminder of what happened after I left, I wanted to keep it with me. Sometimes its black cover, still shiny when I take it out of its case, glints in the sun. Its winking seems to mock me, and everyone else of the century gone by.
I hope my journey back will not be wasted. When, or if things return to normal, will I get another computer? Probably not, our utilisation of them has caused too much trouble; this new millennium should be free of them, home will be better without them, a simpler life awaits.