The Dome

We were all raised in whatever ways, to trust the knowledge of the dying and the dead. I found myself thinking this, repeating it in my head. I understand our suffering, I know the answers, but they fade when I try to speak them, and dissolve back into thought. I turn around and see myself, then I turn around and see myself.

 

Staring at my surroundings, they feel as familiar as a dream I have dreamed before, yet somehow fresh. I am experiencing reality, I am receiving new sensory information. And yet.

The ice that has formed in my mustache is melting. Quickly, the freed water molecules rush in, filling the cracks the sun had burned into my lips. I remember the corpse of a boat, and the rubber siding of a raft, and a helicopter above me.

 

I feel the process beginning, I've had it since I was young. Time winds down and my heart beats like a war drum, and then I have no heart, no breath, no connection to anything, yet I am everything. But then nothing happens, I haven't stopped breathing, my heart is still ticking. I am fear and panic. I remember thrashing in the water in the same way, trying so hard to get out that I had ruined the muscles in my legs for days.

I remember rising into the air, high above the ocean. From there I could see it. The Great Gyre had touched down. Within it stood two lesser gyres, the first upright and the second overlayed the first on its head. At their heart was made a swirling diamond. The clouds broke around it and we rose ever higher. Its sight too awesome, I closed my eyes and my head touched the cold metal floor. The walls burst to life, covered in great electrical vascular systems that flowed from me. I took communion with the beings that met me there. I don't know how I did, maybe its just because I didn't try to run away. I couldn't run away, but if I could, I wouldn't have. Deep down in my heart, I would leave everything to follow this path.

 

If I had been saved then I don't know what this room is now, or if it is even a room. The ocean no longer sits below me, and my deepest gut instinct tells me I have left the universe I know entirely. How does my body know that before I do? And how did we both end up in the same place? The shape of this room suggests it to be a partition of something larger. All the matter, including the air, is animated, like how science told me things looked close up: little bits of stuff spinning and crashing into itself and yet, it still created expressions I understood, like this partition.

 

I was so overwhelmed, I wanted to sleep, to close my eyes and sink into blissful oblivion. Closing my eyes did nothing, in fact, it intensified the characteristic of this sea of undulating chaotic matter. I kept thinking how impossible it was that matter behaving in this way could ever be something. Even in all this I manged to look down at my watch. The second hand ticking away. Though I had already suspected, "Goddamn it," I thought, "this isn't a dream."