Some people just live in the aftermath. Post-explosion. After the war. Long after, when that wound should've healed already, but didn't quite because the kid never got stitches and the whole thing just kind of formed an open pocket of pink, numb, puffy flesh right there on the back of his calf. That's okay, scars are cool.

People live here isolated and with regret, huddling alone in unpadded rooms and underneath doorways, where pieces of plaster ceiling cannot fall in on them. Not anymore.

People live here because they can't quite recall life prior. Because routine and order don't really build on the fundamentals of memory. And whatever came before seems distant, surreal, strangely without cause or sensation. Why did we live like this? Why did we do such things? In this aftermath there is no universal and we all go a little insane.

I live in the aftermath, a melodramatic nuclear winter.

I live in the aftermath because this cold is the only real thing left, you see. Somehow, in the blinding intensity of ground zero, blasted with a hundred mega-tonne of radioactive critical, I mistakenly thought I had found the truth.

hiroshima, my love.