The dream’s not vague anymore. That’s the trouble with starting to pay attention — the thing notices you back, and it stops being polite.
There are two worlds at the edges now and they don’t end the same way, and the fact that they’re different is what’s got me rattled, because you don’t dream up two separate kinds of apocalypse by accident.
The first one goes from the inside. I can’t tell you how I know that, but I do — it’s not a bomb falling on it, it’s a thing rising up through it, like the planet has a heart and somebody’s learned how to reach in and squeeze. It cracks. Quietly, almost, and then not quietly at all. Like a dropped egg, like I keep saying, except an egg the size of a world, and the worst part isn’t the noise. The worst part is that some part of me, in the dream, is proud. God forgive me. There’s pride in it. That’s the detail I wake up trying to scrub off.
The second world doesn’t crack. It just gets thirsty. I watch the water go — not drained, exactly, more like the world forgets how to keep it, like the whole rhythm that moved it around just quits. The blue goes out of it from the edges in. It takes what feels like forever and also like a single held breath. And at the end the thing I can only call the soul of the place gets thin, and thinner, and then it’s a rock. A beautiful rust-colored rock with nobody home.
And I’m at both endings. Not watching from a ship. In them. With dirt on my hands both times.
I used to wake up from these scared. Now I wake up ashamed, which is a hundred times worse, and I lie there in the dark doing the math I don’t want to do: that you don’t grieve a thing this specifically unless you had a hand in it.