About
whose voice is this
You know as well as I how difficult it is for me, to Be. Or at least, I hope you know that. If you are who I hope you are. And it was never more difficult than it was back then, in the time of the red skies and black seas that spilled out from our mouths and eyes from the thoughts made of fire that devoured the sky and our thoughts both, the dream that nestled itself inside all of our heads, burning past our eyelids until all we could see - all we could ever see - was the fire.
I think most people learned to deal with it. In a way, they'd have to. There's no other choice, and even though I feel traces of my symptoms in the faces of those around me, their methods have clearly had more of an effect than my own. My own failure to live with the fire manifested by running from it, fighting dreams and nightmares as long as I could, digging my fingernails into the dirt of waking until they crack and bleed like the sky. The longer I fought, the more unbearable the heat became, until it began to climb out of my eyes and into the waking world. Burning trees, the grass withering and baking into a sickly amber, the sky cracking like an eggshell, and pale, emaciated giants stumbling languidly across the horizon like lost children.
Some of these things, I know others see. Some of these things, I know you see. But not everyone, not all at once. And this separation, this disconnect between you and I, and everyone else, pushes us further and further apart, makes us speak a different language to describe the same thing, the same fire, that crawls inside our head and escapes in different and stranger forms. The real falls into the dream, and the dream falls into the real. The outside becomes the inside becomes the outside.
I hadn’t slept for two days, by the time I was on that train home. It was far from the longest I had gone without it, but already I could feel the fire. Already, I knew I was seeing things the people around me weren’t. When the person in front of me looked out the window, at the pools of black spreading out across the water, oozing from the top of towers of concrete and glass reaching up like the fingers of some immense hand, I knew they just saw the lake. Everything else isn’t there, it’s abstract, numbers from far away that don’t reach them. Or maybe they do see it, and have just learned to live with it in a way I never could. All I know for sure is that despite everything, it was a quiet and pleasant ride on the long train back home.
Without anything else to distract myself with, and so much of the journey left to go, I closed my eyes and tried to push myself into memories. The fire haunts these places too, the way a gravestone marks a birth and death beside each other, each one haunting the other. I remembered the time I stood with you in the old place, the day we last spoke to each other, and I saw a sky above that was more red and terrible than I knew it at the time. Still, I walked through those moments, and those words, and found myself smiling at them, despite everything, despite myself.
I searched for something else, something more solid, something tangible that I could cling to when everything solid I could see would burn at the touch. I reached out through memory and found my drumsticks. I felt myself smile at that and wondered briefly if the man who sat across from me saw it. Beneath the table between us, I began to move my wrists to the slow and steady rhythm of an old song whose name escapes me but whose beat rises out of my muscle memory within moments. I heard other instruments join me, as I looked around with closed eyes and saw others playing like I remember them, sitting in a dusty, too-small room, playing songs we had heard too many times with instruments we held too little. I stayed in that moment for as long as I could, but at the peak of the crescendo, as I lost myself totally to the sounds of every song we played back then overlapping with each other, the door to that tiny room violently swung open with a slam, and left silence in its wake. Everyone else there vanished, leaving their instruments on the ground where they stood. Beyond the door, I saw a barren landscape scorched of all colour, covered with craters and gashes like pockmarks in the skin of a dead world. And hanging above it was our own world, and the sun rising behind it, so large as to consume it entirely.
And then I felt the fire on my skin again.
No matter how the dreams started, they always ended like this. With fire and burning until there is nothing left of us but ash. Sometimes it looks different, sometimes it sounds different, but it always feels the same, for all of us. We always have the same dream, in the end.
I think this is what happens when you’re inside something that’s dying like this. When you're inside a dream that's ending.
When I awoke, I was still on the train. My hands were shaking, but not because I was miming along with music I couldn’t hear anymore. Sweat from my forehead dripped down onto my hands. I looked up at the person across from me, who was still looking out the window, but I saw their eyes dash to avoid mine, something I had seen before and knew all too well.
For the rest of the journey, I gazed out the window. It was difficult. I was scared. I wanted to look away, and scream, and vomit, and run far, far away. A world that ends is an awful thing to see. But for the hour or two that was left until the train arrived at its terminus, I watched this small portion of the world’s death throes.
It seemed the least I could do, for something I was about to kill.