Head in the Sand

I woke up. It felt far too early to be doing that. I think it was the glare of the sun reflecting off the asphalt that sparked me back to life, beams of light like spears that pierced my eyes. My hands were about where I left them: lazily on the steering wheel heated by the sun streaming through my windshield. The road stretched before me. Every inch of ground I covered was a mile, a footstep. A decade. I thought about how clothing trends must have been changing in the world I couldn’t see. I thought about how every word I knew might have fallen out of use by the time I returned. To my left and right was nothing but torrid earth, cracked skulls leaking old memories onto the dirt. I dozed.

Some season spanned in my sleep. It might have been a second, an orbit. I could no longer track the time's passage; my consciousness was nothing but a tumbleweed breeze in my head that filled the space between my ears like breath in a balloon. And no wind would dare to carry the time, so it dragged on by itself. And when I opened my eyes, a view not unlike the one I fell asleep to burned before me. A view not unlike the one that appeared even in my dreams. After a hundred brutal years in my desert, its excuse for a landscape had been branded onto the lids of my eyes.

While asleep, I dreamt of a forest. The forest was tangles of verdant flora, trees up to the clouds. The flowers were dancing to a tune I didn’t know. I watched myself, from outside of my body, as I tried to learn the beat to which the blooms were swaying. It was an exercise only in futility; no man could ever catch onto nature's rhythm. In my dream, I didn't know that. In my dream, I was but a clumsy foreigner visiting a place that refused to recognize me.

For a moment, I thought that the blades of grass had begun to grow limbs, eyes, and faces. And I thought that I might find a friend in the forest. Though I was only dreaming, my skin glowed at the prospect. But after several silent minutes, the grass was no more sentient, and its animation was just a trick of the light. My skin paled.

In my dream, the forest was a lovely place. But it was not long before I noticed the oldest, wisest trees beginning to crumble, as though they foresaw some impending ruin—some change of course in the cosmic wind—and were seeking refuge at ground level. Before I knew it, the others followed suit. A thousand dominoes collapsed before me.

And as the trees fell and the forest flattened, the flowers shrank into blinks of colored eyes. The grass turned gold, then grew legs and walked away. This time it really did grow legs, I think.

And it turned out that beneath the guise of a lush, heaven-sent garden lurked sand dunes; I knew them like the faces of my past. A toothy grin of corroded bones and broken car parts pounced at me from the dust. Beneath me, the asphalt road began to bleed. The sun commenced its descent. I could not feel anything, but I knew I had never felt warmer. Just up ahead, a mountain spawned. It cracked the ground in two. My brakes were broken and I was rolling downhill, but I had no time to redirect. I knew all of these facts like I had chosen them and, even though I was aware of their tragedy, I was without worry.

I was inches from relief when I woke up. Third time today my slumber had been rocked by such a nightmare. Third time today I fell asleep at the wheel.

The road still stood before me, sentinel of my hell. Not a mountain in sight, nor a chasm for the wind to blow me into—if there was a wind. I bit my tongue and I studied my complexion in the rearview mirror. The sun had started to set. Soothing. I bid a tear to roll down my cheek. It splashed onto the car seat, a forest sprang up from the puddle. It was a beautiful oasis. The sun had turned silver now, no longer the inferno I was running from. Somehow, the skulls on the road reminded me of skulls I had seen before. One of them seemed to be wrapped in skin and, in a voice I knew all too well, it told me to wake up.