a dream from some time ago
This is a dream, I realize, and I am right. I look around myself, and I am somewhere where the dirt is red, and the sky is a sickly green, as if the Sun somehow changed hues and temperature enough for the heavens to become algae-filled shore waves. There are plants here, however, trees and shrubs and flowers, and it looks as if I’m on Mars, but Earth, but not either one. It’s a strange in-between, and though I am confused, I am certain of something, in the same way almost-lucid dreamers are whenever they wake in a different world.
There is no sea, and for a reason I can’t pinpoint, this is highly disturbing.
No people surround me, now. But then, there are too many to count. I am speaking now, with someone who vaguely resembles who I think should be my mother. Familiarity seeps into my words and theirs, and the conversation is pleasant, and it is kind, and nothing feels out of place. This world without seas is, for a moment of impossible brevity, calm.
And then, I am reminded of something, in a way I do not remember, a something so big and strange that it seems too far from me, but it is close, and it finally registers in my mind, and my heart races. Perhaps my body, the real one, the Universe-I-belong-to one, is experiencing the same thing.
I shake, but I say nothing. The conversation carries on as usual, and then I am standing in a desert. No plants, not anymore. I am alone, now, and I think back, and find death registries signed by me alone, metal graves I had to build, corpses I don’t think my mind allows me to see, and unintentional genocide. Somehow, I also know, it is something I did, something I had the authority but not the foresight to do, that lead me to stand here, alone and lonely and everything that describes the worst parts of forced solitude.
I am stranded. And then, I am not me, and I have no body or eyes or ears, or any nerves in my body, and yet I am watching as our galaxy and Andromeda collide, but as they do, it is nothing like scientists in either world described. Rather, it is a pull, gravitational and something else, and it tugs at all planets—there are no stars in sight, least of all our measly, unimpressive Sun—until they reach the end, until they are swallowed by a hole that is neither black nor void, but filled to the brim and golden. Perhaps there it is, our Sun. Perhaps I am selfish and self-centered even in my dreams.
There are no explosions, no burning, only the swallowing of every planet we know and do not know of, and they look natural and almost-elegant as they meet their demise, as if this is not a catastrophe. I see, and I hear the buzz, the hum, the suction sound of planets being gulped down unchewed. Our Pluto is last in line, and it feels fitting, for someone as bitter yet resigned as I am about its status, to dream of something like this.
I come back to my body. A spaceship is still untouched. I no longer know what planet I am on, or if there is or was a record of its existence before. I think of it, but don’t act on anything other than instinct and an impending desperation that has not yet settled in. I am feeling strange, and estranged, and resigned. Perhaps this is a metaphor, perhaps it is not. I do not like to think about my own mind more than I need to in order to visit the psychiatrist and feel confident enough to take my meds in the morning when my mother wakes me.
I drop myself on Pluto, and I hope, foolishly. I know how this ends, and yet I hope. There is a metaphor, here, too. I refuse to acknowledge even this one.
Pluto gets five planets close to this almost-Sun, and I believe for a moment, in an entity I know to be fair in only the way nature can be. I only believe in the Universe, for a blissful ending.
I wake up then, and I can only think of what I dreamt, not able to sense anything around me, only that which is inside my skull—or, at the very least, I believe that is where thoughts hide when you wish to find them but are too aware and scare them away in your attempts to flip through them.
I died on Pluto, and felt nothing other than what I can’t allow myself to feel in this world, I think, as the pale blue of the walls hit by the morning sun comes into view.
How fitting, I think, as my mother opens the door to wake me up.
