Thin Air

-- Perhaps;

--Thin lines, rough times.

Perhaps our dreams should simply maintain their current, fictional, consoling form. A form trapped to a diluted reality not quite our own; a comfort that reaches out when we are at our weakest.

A fiber winding through our spines to prod us into maintaining our mandatory, poised composure.

And, perhaps, our dreams and our nightmares have a thin, indecisive line, looping over itself in a vindictive attack on those naive enough to wish either into some form of existence within the time we carelessly abide in.

Perhaps, most of all, my dreams have crossed thickly over that implausible, halting line.

But, perhaps, my dreams happened to be those with the favor to come true.

Slow transitions had drooped into their existence amongst our daily lives, small forewarnings of what was yet to come. Earthquakes began quivering their painful cause; the earth's heartbeat slumming softly as tsunamis thrashed their complaints harshly against the splintering skyscrapers, glass shattering alongside nature's fallible hopes. Tornadoes traced increasingly pressed warning signs into the soft earth, our feeble minds proving to be too one-dimensional to acknowledge the translucent existence of their outreaching, deafening, pleads.

Then, the earth's mutiny quickened. Drastically.

Trees animated themselves into their predestined, deservedly designated thrones where the aimless skyscrapers had once resolutely stood. Nature's outreaching arms distended distortingly into the bellies of factories, telephone poles, workplaces, and the like; a thick blow causing each to topple into befuddled, child-like building blocks at the accomplished feet of the earth's barked representatives.

Civilization crumbled.

Monsters we had written off as folk lore long ago began their downpour.

Earth began to regain its rightful reign.

And we changed.

Those who survived the echoing, slamming fall of society became bent crookedly on the attainment of their own, mortal will: the will to survive. They turned on each other, their families, their friends, the ones they claimed to hold closest to their soured souls; the ones they claimed to love regardlessly before their hearts turned into scaled replicas of the soft piles of rubble surrounding them. Us. We. Our humanity trampled into powder like that which lay scattered around the crumbles of the once flat-paved, city grounds.

As large civilization found itself halted, groups formed, and groups fell, replicating the waves of the ocean we had once neared. An ocean carelessly turned into tides of toxins and carcasses rolling meaninglessly. The earth dying. Slowly, needlessly. Yet through it all, we remained.

Beethoven and I had a group, yes.

Have. It's difficult to not become captivated by the use of past-tense to describe what some may define mistakenly as "life" within our current state. Even though something happened to be here now, it would dissipate so dilutely and quickly you may even begin to believe the notion that it was never quite here to begin with. That nothing but this ever was ever here.

Hope, however, is something that was lost long before the end had ever come. As odd as it may be, it seemed that not everyone had lost hope, but rather hope had lost itself. Perhaps, even we had lost ourselves within the riptides of our immortalized mortality.

The monsters we now have living among us, those cannibalistic, engrossed beasts: they have nothing on what we were; what we are.

Not even a crumbled, chalky heart is excuse for our sins.