Reverie

​

The morning dries and petrichor lingers above the grasses in the soft breezes of dawn’s end. A
sigh; the sweet passing of salt-ridden air. Closing my eyes, my hands find solace in the cool, gritty sands. And I imagine.

They believed, once, that this world would end. That we would fade, with the mists and fogs of a dystopian future, lost in fires and rubble and destruction that only we could bring upon ourselves. A burning, hot desert of a world; where only the best survive. Artificial intelligences, scrabbling about the upturned concrete and disheveled buildings. Lifeless creatures the only occupants for an Earth long dead. An Earth killed.

I keep my eyes lidded, but the world tugs at my senses.

The pulsing of the incorrigible waters is drowned out by the ever-lasting silence.
There – the subtle scuttle of an animal along the bank.
The salt in the air tickles my tongue, and the cool air brushes my cheek. The world seems...
calm.

But only for a while. We know what awaits.
Sunlight begins to burn at my eyelids, but I pull myself from this reality. My long breaths will my heartbeat to slow, a steady beat beneath the thundering pulses of the ocean, and I reach forwards, past the present, into the darkness. Here, the night speaks differently.

Sand swallows my hands as they hold me up, and my wrists itch at its grainy touch.
 

The black; its consuming, racing past yet unmoving, apparent but invisible against the canvas of the night sky. The empty, lifeless blanket of sky. I miss the comfort of the roving stars, but I push forwards, through the space before me. My heart tugs, deep in my chest, aching for some sign of home, of hope; but no bodies live here. There are no souls to stain the earth, no words to tilt the pain, and no us - no one to know our names. The dark lingers and expends us conservatively, despite how we squandered its last forms of life.

I know how we got here.

​

Once, the light of knowing was dim, a sun setting behind silver clouds. The way of life was none other than the way of survival, and for that, imagination, innovation, creation strived. It
slowed near the brightest minds, energizing near the darkest of them. And that was because darkness is the birthplace of all things made.

All the brightest ideas were imagined in a place where innocence loosed the minds of the creative. Even the first light bulb was created in the dark, shunning the shadows, pushing them into the darkest corners of the world – the only places where naivety survives today.

​

While people believe it is the lack of it that holds us back, knowledge is the true blanket that dampens mankind, that restricts the ability to explore the vast unknown.

As society progresses, and as more and more comes into the world, fewer things are left to be
found and every thing is left to be lost. What was once an endless cycle of “imagine, create, inspire,” ends in stalemate; imagine – there’s nothing left to imagine, create – everything has
already been made, inspire – there’s no thought to inspire, and everything has already inspired; expired.

And when everything is left to be lost, it takes no more than a feather to fall the house of cards.

So when the darkness comes rolling over the lands, back to claim the knowledge of creators past, to spark the light that will rebirth all things created, something will be reborn – and the world will renew in a place of darkness; it will restart, to before man’s light, before the invented, before the inventing.

And when it comes, I’ll beg.
Beg that the light doesn’t spark in a man’s heart, doomed to destroy the world;
beg that light will never brighten a man’s mind,
and beg that humankind will remain in the dark in a world that was once born in the black.

Something calls to me, a tug in the darkness and my curious eyes wander, heaving me from hefty thoughts.
Knowledge falls on me, a suffocating weight that numbs my mind.
A hitch in my breath stops my heart and a faint buzz curdles my blood, my words lost in the deadly grip of lore.
I blink at the black.

​

And in the far distance, with the darkness dense and distant and desirous, as I curse under my breath,

 

a lightbulb clicks on.          
click.

​

 

Miles Merdeka

​

​