I dream the apocalypse and at first, it’s troubling—the dead computer, the failed Amazon order for extra ibuprofen. My finished and unfinished manuscripts all turned to black. 0s and 1s forever buried in their digital mausoleum. Goodbye, Cloud. Hello, Acid Rain.
A forcible detethering from my preferred form of meaning-making. Edits, revisions, submissions, rejections, all deadlifted and shot to the heavens by the lack of electricity, Wi-Fi.
The existential pounding immediate, and yet?
Here you are beside me. More beautiful version of a friend’s husband. Man of my dreams, literally.
You take my hand, and it’s just the two of us, escaping a busy downtown hotel where we’ve been waiting for collective demise.
I know a place, you tell me. Wanna head?
Boy, do I.
We wander amid lush explosions. Gorgeous hellfire. Fabulous and inconsequential looting.
I don’t ask where you’re leading me, Andy. Can I call you Andy? Forced as I am into the Now and Here. Unable even to think of my partner, what with the pressure of your palm on mine, a promise of future pleasure.
Hot dog!
You squeeze my fingers, encourage me to hurry, both of us ready to shed our clothes, to bask in side-by-side starvation.
Down, down, down we travel, none of it a metaphor, all of it the truth.
Human cries replace birdsong. Trees shake, anticipating our expiration, their turn again at the world’s wheel. Respiration, baby. Earth’s first dream.
Soon we arrive at a secret cave replete with underground mountain, all wispy fog and ashen boulder and rock face. What was once beneath the ocean and will someday be again.
I’m not afraid, Andy.
You try to tell me this isn’t your name—it’s not—but I place my finger on your lips.
Andy, why haven’t you taken me here before?
Upstairs in the land of the soon-to-be-plankton, my sweet partner eats a last banana. Wonders about me. Sneaks a glance at the notes for my novel—the one about bank robbers and suicide—but it’s all mist, all of it. Even this.
Andy’s hand warm and calloused against my bare shoulder. The space between his open lips, dewy and hesitant.
Oh, Becca.
We’re waiting for each other. Waiting for—
And let me just tell you.
Let me put it down.
I promise it’s worth it—
All bulging throb and hearting groin.
All worksfire and simile and gaze navel.
Andy, so beautiful I cannot even look at him—how he refracts the sun and moon both, even though we’re in a stinking cave.
I smudge words onto the walls and floors: nipple, excavation, ardor…
High above, in our crumbling apartment, my partner reads my journal, missing me, yearning: cowboy boot stuck in tree by campus. He flips a page: I am writer bc I can’t let go.
A single tear drips from his leaky eye.
My leaky guy.
But I don’t know this, can’t, can only inven—
None of it a dream, only fictio—
And Andy’s beside me—curious, gorgeous, his pecs damp with the soon-to-be-acid-rain runoff. Let’s just hold each other until the end ends, babe.
Feelings indescribable until I describe them: ka pow zam whomp whomp
Andy moans, not indecipherably but a full sentence, what matters in the face of abs—
Hold on, dear Andy, let me write it down. Let me just—because if I—
The birds, oh baby, the birds they melodied sweet.