Future Light

The future is dark because its lights have blinded us.

You believe that, don’t you?

Well, I’d like to.  God knows I try.

What god?

(Laughter) Oh, you know.  That scaly something nefarious that slithers in the details.

What the hell does that mean?

What am I, my own psychiatrist?

I don’t know.  Are you obsessed with dreams?  Because those are the worst kind.  Modern day mountebanks, they are.

No, dreams are fun, but what are they but bastardized memory?

(Silence)

Oh, no, no.  You’re right.  I’ve got that backwards.  Lately a dream has haunted me; a dim wraith in the night, really.

Ahh, yes?  And what sort of shape does this wraith assume?  What worldly vessel does it inhabit?

It’s kind of odd, actually.  Most dreams are, obviously–peculiar, that is.  I’m floating in a fish tank.

Yeah?  At the top, like a buoy?

No, and if that happened to be the case, I wouldn’t be a buoy.  That’d be too much credit.  More like driftwood, actually.

Okay, okay.  So what?  You’re floating, utterly submerged?

Precisely.  Suspended animation, I would say, except the occasional buffet of underwater current stop-gaps me.

Anything significant about it, you think?

I don’t think anything if I can help it, you know.  The weirdest thing of all…I can see myself.  And I’m definitely alive.

How can you tell?

Bubbles, man.  Like something decomposing at the bottom of a marsh, all the effervescence in me is leaving for greener pastures.

Bluer waters, you mean?

I suppose that fits nicely, doesn’t it?  So I float there, comatose, my hair fanning in the azure light.  A fist swims by.

What sort?

How would I know?  Something brightly pretty, though, and decidedly perplexed.  Our eyes meet.  I think he knows.

Knows what?

That’d I’d rather be a fish, man.  But he swims away as the light fades, and the blues deepen to black.

And then what?

Well, I watch him until he disappears.  I study bubbles as they float aimlessly away.  And I look at the black, and remember.

How cryptic.  Remember what?

The future is dark because its lights have blinded us.