Easy (Part 2)

The outside world is all but completely white and there's only a slight hint of blue in the sky to tell me where the earth meets the horizon. I can’t help but look out at the landscape and see an empty old house with white sheets tossed over all of the furniture to protect them from dust. But it’s pointless really; the sheets are there to stay, the house will never be a home again.

I venture out during the day out of habit mostly. Sight is just as difficult in the white of day light as in the the near black of darkness. Though it is safer in the day, it is only a bit. Markers I left in the snow, sparse breadcrumbs to ensure I didn’t lose myself in the tundra, are barely visible now. New snow white sheets draped over the old furniture hide them.

I had tried to hide the cache in a way that would be too difficult for others to find, but not so difficult as to where I would not be able to find it myself. The first marker meant to travel west for a hundred paces. The second was east for fifty. The third was west again, for twenty-five. The fourth marker in the in the snow was the location, but a fifth and six marker were placed in the distance to lead anyone who might have attempted to follow the trail astray.

As I dig, her words echo in my head. She’s right, it is not easy. I’ve reached the point where I can’t remember how many days I’ve been here. I kept time for a while with my watch, but the battery eventually died. Honestly I've no idea how long it was dead before I noticed. After I did though, I kept with the clock at the station, but as I began to run lower on fuel, I killed all operations unnecessary to survival. And after that, I attempted to keep time with the passing of the sun. It moves slower here, the days and nights are hours longer than I’m accustomed to. I did the math to count the hours for a while, but eventually it grew tiresome and I deemed it pointless and ceased.
Actually, everything seemed pointless, after a time. Survival is our base instinct, our one true purpose, some would say. However, I found, the more I was forced to struggle, to persist, to revert to the base instincts of survival, the less I truly wanted to. I determined that was what separates us from animals. They seek simply to survive. We wish to live.

Then I found her voice, the voice that saved my life.

I play out different scenarios in my head; vivid and intricate day fantasies to carry me until the night when I can sleep and dream proper. In my mind, I've shaped her form as if she were molded from the sun. Carved out of gold, in my mind she radiates with enough warmth to melt the snow that's covered this world four times over. She is my hope, my fuel, and the only thing keeping me from shutting down and having a white sheet tossed over me like everything else in this forsaken house that is my world.

I pull the cache from the snow, four fuel canisters covered by a tarp and tied together on a rudimentary sled. It is not incredibly hard to pull; I had the forethought to hide it up hill, getting the difficult part over with early. Though now, finding somewhere better to hide it will be much more challenging than the first time.

Of course it's then, while I'm struggling to pull the sled from where it's lodge in the snow, that I see something out of the corner of my eye. A fraction of a second really, something streaking across my vision, disrupting the infinite white. I keep pulling, trying to tell myself that it was a bird, though I had not seen a bird in all my time here, or a mouse, though I had only seen them scurrying about the nooks and crannies of the station.

Then another something darts by in my peripherally and it becomes nearly impossible to convince myself that these are not the larger vermin that stole the fuel from the generators. Impossible to convince myself that they've not tracked me down to find the rest.