despair

I woke with the taste of a bad dream still clinging to my tongue, thick and metallic, as if I had been breathing rust instead of air. My sheets were damp with sweat, my heart beating with the echo of a world that had almost ended. The dream had been apocalyptic in a way that felt intimate and personal, not a distant catastrophe but something pressing directly against my skin. Someone had died, and their death had shifted the balance of everything, tilting reality toward extinction. At the center of it lay an old man stretched in stillness. I never saw his face; it remained blurred and unreachable, like a censored memory. Yet his absence radiated outward, a gravity that bent the emotions of everyone around him. We had arrived at his funeral by accident—or so the dream insisted. The reason for our presence slipped from my grasp each time I tried to seize it, dissolving like mist. All I understood was that I was running, fleeing from a truth I was not ready to confront.

The mourners’ faces resolved into people I recognized, fragments of a past I had tried to seal away. They were acquaintances who carried outdated versions of me in their memories, reflections I no longer wanted to acknowledge. Their eyes felt heavy with unspoken judgments and unfinished conversations. My chest tightened under their collective gaze. I kept my head down, desperate to avoid being pulled back into histories I had fought to escape. In my haste, my little sister’s warm hand slipped from mine. One moment her fingers were curled around my palm, the next they were gone, swallowed by the shifting crowd. When I turned, she was already distant, her small figure struggling to keep pace. Panic unfurled inside me, sharp and suffocating, filling every corner of my thoughts.

It was late afternoon—around four, the hour when daylight begins to thin but has not yet surrendered. The sky hung overhead in a pale, washed-out blue, deceptively calm, while the promise of night crept along the edges like a silent warning. Before us gaped the gravesite: a dark, open mouth in the earth. Its rim was littered with scattered paper bills that fluttered in a restless wind, whispering against the soil like frantic prayers. Then a man stepped forward from the crowd, his presence commanding instant silence. He announced that the time had come, his voice carrying a finality that chilled the air. From nowhere, colossal strings unfurled, shimmering and taut, shooting upward until they pierced the sky. They wrapped themselves around the moon with impossible precision. With a single, deliberate pull, he dragged it aside. The heavens lurched. The sun blinked out as if snuffed by an unseen hand. Streetlights flickered and died one by one, and from the thickening darkness emerged towering, slender figures who moved with mechanical obedience to his will.

I forced my frozen body into motion. Finding my sister became the axis around which all my fear revolved. The thought of facing my mother without her drove me forward with desperate urgency.

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