I remember it so clearly; Yes, I refer to the day the sun never rose.

We are a nomadic people. When one of us got hurt, the others would carry them. Our chief never let us quit. He was punctual to the power of punctual. He would rise with the sun, trek with the sun, and set with the sun. Unlike the rest of us, he never knew darkness.

The cooks had it worst of all. They would wake up hours before the sun went up just to prepare food for the rest. We were to be done with our breakfast before the sun pushed off its blankets of red and emerged from its sleep as the golden beacon it is. Any food we didn’t finish would be put in our traveling-sacks, along with our other necessities (such as a string-like weed for a rope and a few smooth pebbles), and we would have to carry it while we walked. Our lunch-break started precisely at noon, and the cooks would cook up a few vegetables and mushrooms we could find. We had to trust our chief on what to eat, for he was the only one who knew exactly which foods would not hurt us. Those chefs had to over-work to prepare us a meal, which included making a fire with the bundles of wood they carried.

Hunting time was next, and everyone who was not a cook, woman, or hurt would hunt for food. The chief was the fiercest of us all, and would always find the biggest deer. Killing one of these big animals with a bow and arrow (made from our bundles) was never an easy task, but everyone hoped to be the first three to kill a deer. After three we would stop hunting, and those who had not killed a deer would be forced to help carry them. The only person in our tribe who always helped carry a deer, even if he killed it, was our chief. Never were we allowed to slow our pace. One deer was for dinner, and the other two would be buried for breakfast. Our chief would sleep when the sun went down, so dinner had to be ready half an hour before. We stopped when the sun turned red, so you could imagine the trouble the chefs had.

Then the night came. Complete and total darkness reigned. The clouds came down from heaven to say “Hello!” and made merry here on earth. Their merriment drowned out the power of the sun and gave the dark a permanent throne. Darkness had a hold on earth, just because of the cloud’s oblivious nature to the real world. When the chief woke up, he was greeted by a cold hug from the clouds, who refused to move at all. The sun’s splendor was hidden from us, and though the chef’s fire gave us light, we could not make heads or tails of where the sun started his trek and how we should trek to head west! The chief simply decided that the sun had not come up yet. He went back to bed and slept for a good week. 

We seemed to have been blessed, for we set up camp at a meadow full of deer. Food was never a problem for us. We became lazy, and played games and did things for merriment instead of for survival. We were like this for a decade, give or take a few years, and the thoroughly flustered chief decided he would simply wait and see if the sun ever came up again. It seemed as if we would be like this forever.

After ten short years he came. Born from the stories passed down to our kids about our trekking days, this invisible man emerged from the ashes of the flame. With his dagger he stabbed us, near the neck, in the back, and it felt cool, warm, and delightful all at once, and made straight for the mind. One dose of this blade was enough to put a man out for ten minutes, thinking joyfully about the past. Every day at story time he would emerge, and if any had ears to hear the story told, they would be victims of this terrible dagger. Soon, after it reached the mind, it would slowly make its way down to the heart. 

Memoriam was his name, and he was equipped with two daggers: Nostalgia, and its brother Poignant. Together they controlled souls, sometimes to madness, sometimes to death. Our tribe had been pricked with Nostalgia, and as soon as it started to prick our hearts the madness began. It started with the chief. Exactly at sunrise, he walked off into the distance. Most of us followed him. Everyone who was younger than twenty and older than twenty-five came. Unknown to us, Nostalgia had pricked the chief so hard that Memoriam had a rope tied about his neck, controlling our poor chief. Our fat bodies struggled to keep up with him, but he never stopped. Eventually, without any warning, he dropped down and slept.This kept on happening, and soon Nostalgia was pricking all of our hearts. Memoriam got the older generation first, and then the younger. Everyone who was not old enough to remember, or not born yet, thought this was a rather funny business, and continued along with the rest of us anyway. Soon we fell back into our previous schedule: Cook, Eat, Walk, Gather Veggies, Cook, Eat, Walk, Hunt, Walk, Bury food, Cook, Sleep. Day after day we did this, and soon Memoriam had no need for his ropes. We were doing it out of our own will for survival in the wilderness.

    After a week’s journey, the clouds left us, and we started moving again. Sometimes, at random, one of us would want to stop, but Memoriam simply unsheathed Poignant, and regret filled the man against the time that they stopped walking and became lazy. We were, most of us, voyagers again. We became strong once more, and healthy, and kept walking. New problems came, such as a switch from the forests we wandered to the savanna, but we always adapted, improvised, and overcame.