Streets that were once so familiar to me now seemed alien.
I could almost envision what the streets used to look like, a filter of denial in my brain which painted everything the way I wanted it to be if I closed my eyes. That building, the one over there which now had no windows and half of the roof missing, that used to be one of the grandest apartment blocks in Titan with luxurious white brick and golden framed french windows. If I closed my eyes, I could almost see the peach curtains of around the 50th floor. The old woman who lived there always had the windows open, welcoming in the sunshine to her salmon-carpeted, mauve-decorated lounge. The curtains waved like a patriotic flag, patriotic of what I didn't know. Patriotic of the colour pink, probably. I was always drawn to this certain apartment because music would waft down from it. The extinct music that you would never hear in modern times, a cacophony of orchestral instruments that I would never know how to name. I often wondered what the lady who lived there was like. I imagined her to be called Dolores or Cathy, something incredibly old-fashioned yet glamorous.
I could still hear the faint whisperings of the music she played when I opened my eyes: music that sounded expensive. Music that sounded like champagne, like strawberries and cream. Music that cried out waistcoats and monocles.
The image of the luxurious white apartment slowly faded. Like liquid being poured over it, the ugly reality seeped down the walls, engulfing luxury. Liquid destruction.
The bricks became doused in soot and matter, an ugly splattered grey. Half of the roof had collapsed inwards, leaving the floors destroyed and ceilings caved in. Bricks were chipped and broken, leaving gaping holes in the side of the wall. The french windows had been shattered and if I looked closely, I could see the demolished tatters of the patriotic pink flag, now an ugly brown. The flag of demolition. The flag of defeat.
I had been walking for what felt like millennia through this waste land, wading through rubble, ash and glass. I'm pretty sure tears had begun to stream down my dirt-covered cheeks, despair similar to the clouds overhead roiling in me.
Still, I kept going. Everywhere was destroyed for as far as the eye could see. Entire buildings had fallen to their knees, spitting people's belongings onto the street. Fractions of people remained. When I was walking down a street close to my house, passing a building whose entire top half had toppled over, a small stuffed bear sat on the street.
I don't know why I picked it up, the small stuffed bear whose right side was entirely charred and whose arm and ear was missing. Maybe because it looked as pitiful as I looked, a survivor of this disaster, lost and awaiting death.
That's when I saw the locket. I don't know why I opened it, I probably shouldn't have done. In fact, I would've probably been a lot better off without seeing it. But now it's engraved into my memory.
The locket was tied carefully around the bear's neck, in the shape of a heart. The front said a word in a language I didn't recognise, a different alphabet of swirling letters and beautiful calligraphy. I pushed the soot off it, swiping it gently with my equally dirty thumb. Hesitantly, I clicked it open.
My breath caught in my throat. A little girl and presumably her mother. The girl was tucked into a tight hug, both of them smiling at the camera, brown eyes lit honey-coloured with joy. One thing was for sure, if this girl had survived, there was no way she'd leave this teddy behind.
I fell to my knees amongst the rubble of the building. The building itself loomed threateningly over my head, an ominous spectator. Carefully, fighting tears, I took the locket off the bear and placed it around my own neck.
I remember vowing in that moment to stay alive for as long as I could. I might be the only person left to remember the people in the locket now.
I clutched this symbol of survival in my fist. "I'll live on."
Homeward bound.
Miraculously, my building was still standing, maybe a kilometre tall of dull grey. This part of Titan was nothing like the white-bricked part. Before, the alleys between the flat blocks were riddled with wannabe criminals like myself. Every flat that could afford it was equipped with burglar alarms and advanced locks. This area was the limbo between luxury and basic living. We could've afforded a white brick flat, probably, with my dad being an AI developer for C.Brook, but mum wanted a view of the Old Town which of course meant paying more. Before her disappearance, she would wake up early every morning, sipping over-priced coffee in a china cup, staring out of the floor to ceiling window of the living room. All we could see was Big Ben and some other lesser known landmarks, dwarfed by the immense size of every flat block surrounding it.
"History is art," she would always say if I asked her why she liked looking at the decrepit clock tower so much. "It's a picture frozen in time." She would make a square imitation of a camera with her two hands, peering through it with one closed eye. She would make a clicking noise with her tongue, as if taking a mental picture even though she saw it every morning.
"Why not build a new Big Ben?" I often asked her. "A better Big Ben that isn't falling down and whose clock actually works."
She used to look at me fondly. "History is as much part of humans as humans are part of history." She would place a hand over her heart dramatically. "Destroying Big Ben to build a better one would be to destroy part of us." I never understood what she meant then.
That's when I decided to walk past my flat block, my feet involuntarily taking me to Big Ben.
The old clock tower lay in a pile of rubble.
Maybe I did feel like a part of me had been destroyed when I saw it.
I imagined how my mother would react if she'd never gone missing. I wondered if she'd sit in our windowless apartment, staring at the rubble like it was never broken, sipping her coffee in a chipped and charred mug. She would never let history go.
I supposed that history was never really destroyed.
I raised my hands to my eye, forming a square imitation of a camera and making a clicking noise with my tongue.
In my mental image, Big Ben wasn't a pile of rubble. It wasn't even the slightly green, slightly hunch-backed tower that I knew. It was Big Ben in its former glory. The echo of its chimes played in my head.
Even though the world was dying, its former glory would live on in the memory of the survivors.