Dystopian depths

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. I'd always imagined sleep to be a temporary emancipation of our souls from our bodies, snatched from their very cores and hurled into the dark depths of the unknown to ebb and flow along the fabric of space-time, interacting with whichever other souls they drifted by.

That night, I couldn't sleep. My restless limbs twitched over the dampened sheets, softly glowing in the moonlight. The sirens still ringing in my ears - or maybe that was just my tinnitus. I gulped an aspirin in a feeble attempt to quell the voracious current in my head. The last dregs of water in my glass swished gently as I lay it down on the bedside table. We’d been rationing water for as long as I could remember since the droughts hit, but now the floods had forced them away, I almost caught myself staring in contempt at the transparent liquid that remained in my glass. I imagine it teeming with pride and disdain, watching me toss and turn. "Pathetic fallacy," I sigh. I hadn’t written in so long. Since the floods eroded everything I cared for, I couldn’t bring myself to put words to paper. I’d last written in that house, and my last memory of that house was the blunt terror in my little brother’s eyes, his feral screams fading out as the current snatched him instantaneously away.

I force myself to shift my focus. ‘"Think of something dry" my therapist’s voice ripples.

"Nothing drier than my humour" I would retort. Ha. Therapists - everywhere, but never any groundbreaking advice to offer. Just watered down anecdotes from their equally disturbed predecessors.

Predecessors.

I close my burning eyes as the pitiful images of the millennial generations splay before them - their sprawling, smoking factories, monstrous fishing ships, garbage-littered lives on full, exhibitionist display. Just as we were forced to study in History. Mrs Chadlyn’s soft voice would endlessly blather on about the hedonistic era - characterised by gluttony, guile and the glorification of excess. "They slowly suffocated the earth, without any human consideration for the lives of their offspring," she’d state, "until it became starved of resources, deprived of balance, and fell chronically ill." What an allegory.

"You," - she’d point at each of us with her long, bony finger - "are its doctors. Train hard and well." I was reprimanded for asking what would happen if I wanted to be an author instead.

I hated history, but in a way I viewed it as a rite of passage. I had to learn about the primitive beasts that roamed our planet before us, drunk on delusions of civilisation, progression and grandeur. How else would I be able to curse them for forcing us to be born into a world where competition for the bare necessities of existence is so ferocious that filial ties are forgotten in favour of survival. "If heaven and hell exist," I think to myself, "we’ll all surely be going to hell." But I was taught to have faith in a loving God; it wasn’t Them who had killed the earth, after all.

I say a prayer, my forehead exposing premature creases from my daily brow-furrowing ritual, beseeching an intelligent Creator to have mercy on the descendents of the dense. I ask for sustenance, an anchored shelter and respite from my crippling fear of large bodies of water. "I swear, I’ll never disrespect what I have." I couldn’t anyway. My anxiety from that day stalks me like a hungry orca, and life on today’s planet doesn’t favour the broken. So it goes.