The Illustrated Encyclopedia of an Imaginary Universe

A hill overlaid with a seal’s whiskers gone green. Clouds painted dusk by the setting sun, which now serves as a sparkling crown for the trees and the hills in the distance. Our lengthening shadows are cast alien. Like chords dripping with water, ascending to an uncomfortable place, I sit down on the crest of the tiny moments that we have left. We’ve tried to stop the clock, to forbade the planes to land, but the tide keeps coming up and and up, something more sinister than water touching us with malicious intent. There’s danger in the curves of the water and how they seem to want something more than just to erode the land but also to eat away our moments, our time, our hearts; a cancer above all cancers.

It seems that we are not the only ones trying to push away the descending veil. We’re all sufferers of ridiculous hubris. An incurable disease of escapist delirium and foolish indifference. It’s as if we’re being crushed under our own weight and there is nothing we can do about it. All of us locked into our erect little cages, pushing outward into the darkness that feels like a warm mother, groping for a future that is not ours to take.

How truly graceless we are, birds lacking wing and feather. We are envious of the sky and how we cannot hang in empty space, frozen and prickly with tiny ice. But how strategically frightened we are, truly timid but wanting to break free. The clocks within us all strike within distance and sometimes it seems that’s all we have left to corroborate our own lives. But is it actually enough?

What do we really want and aren’t we tired of fooling ourselves into believing we have the time to attain that goal? It isn’t just the springs and coils in our hearts that are winding down as the days move onward; we’re breached from the outside by great stones, trees that cease the wind with a whistling, and that invisible creeping that has risen well above our ankles now.

We can only wade into our pitiful futures.