Mentioned Resurrection - Tumblr Posts

Empty Seats

There are empty seats at the dinner table. Not many, but they are there.

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There are many Government Departments that are proposed, many that never come into being. Departments that never get a seat at their ever-expanding dinner table.

Adam and Robin mourn what could have been, but they feel no real attachment. They never existed, they never lived, and thus they never died.

Out of all their children, their departments and their states and their human friends who had nowhere else to go, only two of their personified children had passed.

The Department of the Navy; Russell Jones.

The Department of Commerce and Labor; Clementine Jones.

Russell passed in 1947, seemingly overnight. Nothing left of him, but the gaping holes in their souls where he once occupied is all they needed to know. They woke, and their oldest child– Robert, who once had both blue eyes, now had one green.

Russell had green, and whatever being decided which of their children passed and merged with another decided that the younger Department of Navy would merge with War and fade from existence. His seat at their dinner table remains untouched.

Clementine passed in 1913, still only a teenager in body and 10 years alive. She was replaced by Mary and Jason, when the Dept. of Commerce and Labor split into two departments. Her seat barely had the time to leave its mark at the dinner table.

Their departments may not be made the same way Adam and Robin are, but they’re closer to their parents make-up than the States. States shatter and they change, they never leave anything behind because their body recycles itself.

Governments and other personifications similar to them– agencies, departments, services– fragment in similar ways. But they leave nothing. They don’t reform. They leave no bodies. Adam and Robin don’t know what higher power their departments are connected to, the place to which they return, but that doesn’t make it hurt less.

They couldn’t bring their children back, you can’t bring government personifications back from death.

Postmaster, their little Paige, hadn’t died. Not quite. But, he had changed. The post offices were privatized and their child changed with them. He wasn’t their Paige anymore, he left and never came back. They see him, sometimes, when he delivers the mail.

He doesn’t recognize them. He doesn’t remember them.

It feels like he did die. His seat at the table still empty.

…

And there had been a human, the only human they loved like a child. More than their parents and children’s human friends– no, it was as if he was their actual child.

A boy named Gregory, he had no last name when they met him, 8-years-old and living on the streets in the early 1990’s. They would have taken him, plucked him off those streets and taken him home.

But, for some reason, they couldn’t. They couldn’t make a human immortal, couldn’t keep him and knew it’d hurt more when he died of old age. But, they helped him. They found a place, they found him a family. They studied them, made sure they would do well and do right by the child they had already decided was theirs.

But it didn't work.

Gregory caught an illness, and it was left untreated for too long. They had been in Europe the entire time, and returned to find him gone.

…

But humans were easier to bring back. It would take effort, they only brought back the dead as corpses to do their bidding and to punish their wretched souls.

Gregory had been a kind boy, quiet even. They couldn’t do that to him.

It took a while, he wasn’t perfect by any stretch– some of his skin was a bit grayer than would be considered healthy, his eyes a tad too cloudy. Quieter, they couldn’t quite repair his voice, but he was back.

He wasn’t human, not anymore. He was too different.

More like them.

He still enjoyed reading, still enjoyed recording and people-watching. He was still Gregory, still the little Greg they remember walking home when they found him out in the evenings. He still grows and ages like a human, but once he reaches a certain point that will stop. He’ll be alive as long as they are, he will have his seat at the dinner table

Yet, the empty seats at their dinner table– the ones left by their departed departments and agencies and (for the longest time) their avoidant States still mock them.