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July 26, 2017 - 308 words
I have to write this down so I can restore my memory the next day. The book is filling up.
Dust and sand and fire and glass. All swirling together in an inferno of fear. That’s what I saw anyway. The desert was a blistering wasteland of hallucinations and nobody warned me it would be impossible to know what was real and what was a projection of my confusion. Even knowing I had to decipher reality was a task easily forgotten in this vortex.
I only write this down so I can restore my memory the next day. It’s like reading someone else’s words.
A tall Japanese woman glided past my shoddy campsite, her white dress unaffected by the maelstrom, soft black hair draped like a thin blanket over her narrow shoulders. She was irritated about something. I couldn’t see her face but I had a sense for prickly women and a stronger sense for avoiding them.
The soundtrack changed. Suddenly it was a black forest of broken violins all sawing on a different note, a microtonal disaster. In another context someone might call it art, but in this context I would call it hell because that’s where I was and anything in hell is part of hell. Even I am hell. I do not like this line of thought.
Lightning ripped across the sky in a live painting of furious colors. Someone else described it as an inferno of fear and I liked that so I wrote that in my book. I only write this down so I can restore my memory the next day, but it’s not very helpful. It’s like reading someone else’s dream.
The heavenly choir in the clouds erupted in a sustained chord of exultation and I shivered as though a bucket of ice water had broken apart above my head. So weird.