This is the way.
Jun. 11th, 2013 04:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crowsPut yourself into good company. Eat a good meal and watch some familiar, humorous television. Go home. Muse about stories, about music; share a little art. Sleep, after that, but not too much. A little less than five hours, that's the outside end. The most you get to have at one unbroken stretch. Then:
Decamp to a house somewhere up in nameless mountains, rambling property past the wend of a few gravel roads into the foothills, past some miles and maybe a generation or two of bad history. Know that things are getting ugly out there, that you're getting away from the city or the town or home because you'll be safer. Don't know much more than that. At least, don't know when you wake up. Go for a while like that. Preparing, maybe. Trying to keep tabs. Mainly just waiting. Talk to them on the telephone, at some point, and then lose them (to anger? to a failing of technology?). Be unable to get through. Repeatedly, after that. Worry, vaguely, but tell yourself that things are probably alright. It's not that strange to not be able to call somebody for a while. They'll get through eventually.
Stand in the windows after the impetus of some announcement, all the news fragmented at least to your waking memory, most of the knowledge preternatural, an unspoken understanding wafting in from outside. Look out to sea, out over the flat of land rambling away from the mountains. See an unreasonable distance, out to ships on the distant water, out to the pole, maybe forever around the curve of the ocean's belly. Watch the bright orange streak launch across the sky. Have time to process little more than the words when one of the people you are staying with in this house explains that it is the bomb. The Bomb. He had a name for it, but lose that when you wake. Stare in stunned silence as it hits, somewhere far away, and turns the sky molten nonetheless. Watch as it sends up a wave high enough to rush up into the town where you'd been living, into the streets. Frantically close windows as though they will protect you from a shockwave. Experience none, directly, but know that from here, things will not get better. Begin filling the milk jugs and tubs you've been collecting and rinsing with water. Realize you never heard from them. Realize you are never going to hear their voice again.
Wake, digesting this realization. Wake to the alarm of the cat jumping onto the bookshelves at the foot of the bed and staring at the window, at a sound. Wake up and turn the light on, wake up and shake yourself into the familiar, into the understanding that there's just a raccoon in the pine tree, that the world has not ended, that you do not live by the sea.
Decamp to a house somewhere up in nameless mountains, rambling property past the wend of a few gravel roads into the foothills, past some miles and maybe a generation or two of bad history. Know that things are getting ugly out there, that you're getting away from the city or the town or home because you'll be safer. Don't know much more than that. At least, don't know when you wake up. Go for a while like that. Preparing, maybe. Trying to keep tabs. Mainly just waiting. Talk to them on the telephone, at some point, and then lose them (to anger? to a failing of technology?). Be unable to get through. Repeatedly, after that. Worry, vaguely, but tell yourself that things are probably alright. It's not that strange to not be able to call somebody for a while. They'll get through eventually.
Stand in the windows after the impetus of some announcement, all the news fragmented at least to your waking memory, most of the knowledge preternatural, an unspoken understanding wafting in from outside. Look out to sea, out over the flat of land rambling away from the mountains. See an unreasonable distance, out to ships on the distant water, out to the pole, maybe forever around the curve of the ocean's belly. Watch the bright orange streak launch across the sky. Have time to process little more than the words when one of the people you are staying with in this house explains that it is the bomb. The Bomb. He had a name for it, but lose that when you wake. Stare in stunned silence as it hits, somewhere far away, and turns the sky molten nonetheless. Watch as it sends up a wave high enough to rush up into the town where you'd been living, into the streets. Frantically close windows as though they will protect you from a shockwave. Experience none, directly, but know that from here, things will not get better. Begin filling the milk jugs and tubs you've been collecting and rinsing with water. Realize you never heard from them. Realize you are never going to hear their voice again.
Wake, digesting this realization. Wake to the alarm of the cat jumping onto the bookshelves at the foot of the bed and staring at the window, at a sound. Wake up and turn the light on, wake up and shake yourself into the familiar, into the understanding that there's just a raccoon in the pine tree, that the world has not ended, that you do not live by the sea.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-11 11:15 pm (UTC)Sending supportive thoughts your way.