Gilded Cage 1

Posted on 31 Aug 2015 @ 3:17am by Commander Andreus Kohl
Edited on 31 Aug 2015 @ 3:26am

957 words; about a 5 minute read

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Andreus Kohl’s Personal Log, supplemental entry.

I feel… different? I feel… free? I haven’t felt this way in a long, long time. I feel as if I’ve let go of… of something. I feel as if there’s a lot I’ve rolled into a bottle and tossed into the sea. And yet, despite how freeing it feels, I can’t say I feel liberated. As much as I feel like I’m untethered by my past, and free from my fear for the future, I’m also feeling free from hunger. Free from desire?

I’ve spent the past couple of years so buried under the weight of my traumas. It’s like I’ve been cocooned in my own scar tissue; everything hurt. My father died the day I stepped aboard Galileo. I didn’t cope well. I didn’t want to talk about it, I didn’t want to acknowledge it. Really, I had no one to talk to. My father’s wife and I don’t speak, and I was never close to my brother. It’s taken me time to form any friendships aboard the ship. And then I was very nearly killed by rogue Klingons rampaging through Sickbay. I hardly survived that only to face surviving exposure to radiation from the [redacted] project.

I thought I was starting to feel my way through my grief over my father dying in a shuttle crash, when I boarded a shuttle. And it crashed. I was supporting one of Galileo’s planetary surveys, and my shuttle was damaged by volcanic ash. The shuttle fell out of the sky, and somehow we all survived. I suppose I only stopped grieving for my father when I encountered the Borg. I was lucky —I have to tell myself— I was so blessedly lucky. So many of the crew were assimilated and I was not. The Borg only injured me, only paralyzed me. I’ve spent the past year devoted to my rehabilitation and I’m finally walking on my own two feet without assistance. I’m finally connecting to the people around me; trying to meet all of the new crew-members I ignored while I was tending my wounds.

I think I’ve stopped mourning the friendships I’ve lost, all of the near-loves I’ve lost. Coming to Galileo as a nurse, I was supposed to stop changing my career like I change underwear. I was supposed to hunt for love. I was supposed to hunt for some romantic notion of family. But I think I’m giving up the hunt. There’s something about this career, something about the way I behave within this career, that isn’t conducive to much of a life beyond duty. I have this wicked pattern. By the time I finally notice that someone favours me, I’ve lost the opportunity to explore if we could be good together. I suppose I can’t say I’ve lost love if I haven’t found it in the first place. I hardly started anything with Gabriel, with Keval, with Lucalin, even with Pola. …Ahem …Whomever you are, listening to this personal log from the far future, you’ve probably heard all of my other logs about Ellsworth and K’os too, I imagine.

And poor sweet Victarion. We thought we could beat the odds. We thought we could resurrect our childhood crush and pull something out of its grave other than a rotting zombie. A rotting, jealous, bed-death zombie. At least this time Victarion got to say good-bye in a letter, rather than vice versa.

As much as the past has stopped haunting me, I’m also not living for the future. I’ve attained rank and position; things I didn’t think I would have for another decade, let alone today. I’m a department head and second officer of Galileo. Certainly… I never imagined I would be a Chief Science Officer. But, I fancy myself an expert in my niche of the Life Sciences. I am. And I’m learning how to leverage all of the experts surrounding me. I suppose I’m all the more fortunate to be serving aboard a science-specialty starship; there’s all the more experts to leverage. I know I have more to learn, so much more to learn, but this is where I want to be. I don’t know that I want to be a Captain. Not necessarily. I need to think and breathe through that for a time, before I can decide if that’s what I want.

And so, without a past to chase me or a future to hunt, I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t know how to motivate myself. It’s the agony of free will, isn’t it? I could do anything now, absolutely anything, and that kind of freedom is overwhelming. It’s terrifying. And so I do nothing.

I need to learn. I need to learn how to believe. In the present. I must believe in the present above all. The present moment is only thing worth believing in. That’s something my mother always told me, something Hamidah always told me. It’s all you can trust. The past can only be remembered through secondary sources. The past only exists in holograms and unreliable memories that get rewritten through the act of remembering them. The future is a nebulous thing, in a constant war between free will and fate. You can’t rely in the future, nor the past. All I have is now.

All I have is now.


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