after the fall part 6: extinct

everything follows a certain pattern, which can be summed up as:
the bow is drawn, the arrow flies, the arrow falls.
from the three act narrative structure of a play to the span of an individual's life,
every thing in this world, every society and species
follow the pattern and will one day vanish, never to be seen again,
only half-glimpsed through scattered fossil records and fragmented heiroglyphics.
if you need evidence, look at the dodo,
the wooly mammoth, the egret, the polar bear, the jaguar, the carrier pigeon -
the list goes on and on,
as it does with great cities: herculaneum and pompeii, ankgor wat, alexandria, uxmal, memphis -
and in my lifetime so many more. so many more..
we somehow thought that we would never be the set of bones in the display case
in some future generation's museum.
with all of our vivacity - our symphonies and sculptures, our science and scriptures -
we thought man would dominate forever. it's easy to see how
when you look at the massive overgrown stretches of interstates
that once made the earth throb with thousands of motors -
what else could invincibility be?
yet there is a finite number to each thing - each blink, each breath, each meal
and there is so rarely any way to predict which one will be the last.
we lived like a cancer, that reproduced unsustainably with no thought of
the overall good of the host organism and yet
like a star going supernova, the brightest and most beautiful period was
right before we imploded. i hope
that whoever will find this, if ever anyone or anything does,
will judge us kindly and forgive us. we just didn't know what we were doing
and it cost us everything we had.