My eyes fluttered open as I woke up, light above and a flower bed below me. It didn't take me a long time to piece it together. I knew what it meant. The blue sky, accompanied by unstained clouds that crept and flowed undisturbed and would continue to do so no matter what happened in the world. The sky would always be indifferent to us and our suffering. Even if we laid in mud and bled, the sky would still smile, the sun would not stop shining.
But what I needed the most was for the world to turn grey and shatter. The glass needed to break for me to reach the other side, to touch and feel the life leave my body with each breath. But instead, the view before me was a colorful one, speaking in a language so golden that all I could hear was a glorious hum.
Her fingers struggled to find mine but relaxed once they did. The warmth of her seeped into me, and through that link we shared our pain of existing. I expected her to smile, but she didn't, she wore an expression that, regardless of her having no regrets, was a face of denial and persistence. Wind blew her hair to cover her eyes, and I was secretly glad I wouldn't have to look into them anymore, so dull and unflattering they were.
"I despise you", She spoke. It was the last thing that she would ever say to me, I knew that much. It might not have sounded particularly aggressive or sincere, yet I knew she meant it with all her heart. I didn't recall her ever saying anything as lively as that. I was satisfied, ecstatic. Hatred was what kept us alive, it was our only connection to the living breathing world.
I took the red and painted my world with it, tinted it and broke it. The color splattered over the floorboards and windows, but it wasn't burning in blood anymore, it was light and almost pleasant to watch. Her world on the other hand was polluted, white fields and hallucinations as far as the eye could see. Beneath it all laid barren land, soaked in moss and dead, slowly rotting leaves.
People were prone to fear, it was an instinct to prolong death. But some, the undone ones, they lacked this sense of judgement, the sense of danger and urgency. They walked the world in a calm pace that never quickened and never slowed. They lacked not only the fear of death, but the ability to evolve. They were feathers floating down from the sky, until the ground eventually swallowed them.
Living without a purpose was a daily death, it was the mere act of breathing, there was no end to it and there was also no beginning. The eternal cycle would continue even once buildings collapsed into the flooding oceans, brown and ash consuming all that humanity had struggled to build. Corpses of casino slots and furniture carried by the wild river, they swam and sunk with the remnants of life. Of all that resembled life.
But her hand was still tangled with mine, and it would stay that way until we both rotted away. We could no longer take back what we had done and become, we could have hidden it while we still lived. Now only an earthquake could separate us, but I hoped that earthquake would come soon and tear apart the ground between us.
Whenever I died, I remembered the passing pain and the peace that followed. It was a kind of peace that could never be imitated or experienced in the real world, it only existed in the vast realities of one's consciousness. When I died, the world ended. When she died, the world fell apart but it still continued to thrive. Sewage water spilled from windows of office buildings and all the fields that we used to run on disappeared.
We wavered in time, the only thing that would continue to exist once nothing else did. It made me nostalgic, but I had nothing to be nostalgic about. I had no memories.
Jamie's hand squeezed mine, softly at first, but soon the pressure became agonizing. Red splattered onto the grass, where crows gathered to feast on what used to be. The sky carried us, it knew more than it let others believe, it knew everything about us and because of that no one could hide from it.
When the final apocalypse began, our utopia ended. The awakening was a blur of orange light reflected and bouncing off concrete and tides in the ocean. I whispered to her plenty, but she remained unfazed and blind to the changing scenery and movements of the sun above and beyond us. The soil grew into us, flowers blooming and grass dripping of morning dew.
The world burned and dissolved into a million flames, I cried at the sight of it and I cried at the sound of it, even though I would never hear it. I was possessive of this world, for I had always wanted to conquer it with nothing to hold me back and with nothing to greet me at the end. I just wanted to embrace it all as though I deserved it.
Her hand began to turn into bone and air, and no longer could I tell whether it was her hand or just an illusion to keep her memory alive. But it was the only thing that was left of her, with me, it was all that I knew was real, for certain. Flowers withered against the dying sun, speaking to me in colors I could not not see.
