I dreamed of the end of the world.
Not in flame, nor in the shriek of sirens, but in a long exhale — as though the earth, having held itself rigid for centuries, finally allowed its shoulders to drop. The city lay open. Not destroyed, but undone. Windows sagged inward; elevators rested between floors; steel surrendered itself, slowly, to the orange bloom of rust.
Grass had entered the lobbies.
It rose through marble, through the fine, self-important veins of tile. Moss climbed the ribbed spines of escalators. Vines coiled lovingly around the skeletons of servers, threading their green fingers through circuits that once pulsed with invisible command. The language of wires — urgent, stuttering — had dissolved into wind moving through leaves.
I walked where traffic once convulsed.
The tall grass brushed my palms. It parted and closed behind me, forgiving my passage. No screens flashed their pale demands. No advertisement leaned close to whisper what I lacked. The silence was not empty; it was layered — insects stitching the air, seed heads trembling, the slow tick of cooling metal giving up its last stored heat.
I did not ask what price had purchased this quiet.
I only walked.
—
In waking life, the air tastes faintly metallic. Fluorescent light needles the back of my eyes. The invisible clock does not hover — it digs its metal thumbs into my ribs and presses until my breath shortens. My phone warms in my hand like a small animal that must be fed constantly or it will turn on me. Numbers bloom and multiply; messages breed in the dark.
I wake to prove I deserve the air.
—
In the dream, I passed through the financial district — that cathedral of velocity — and found foxglove lifting its bells where brokers once barked into headsets. The casino: the trading floor lay softened under a pelt of clover. I could not hear the old shouting. Only wind, moving with a patience that did not humiliate me.
The buildings no longer measured me.
I was not a data point crossing a threshold. I was not a résumé rehearsing itself. My body was sufficient evidence of my existence. I walked, and that was enough.
—
In waking life, my mind paws at the walls of my skull. It replays conversations with forensic cruelty. It inventories failures. It scrolls through other lives and returns to mine as though to a poorly furnished room. Even rest becomes performance — I must optimize it, track it, improve it. The great machinery of urgency does not sleep; it hums beneath the mattress, a generator that never quite shuts down.
How swiftly the texture of days has hardened into transaction. Even affection is timestamped.
—
In the dream, cables lay across the pavement like shed skins. The servers had cooled; the towers had forgotten their height. I stood in the center of the avenue, grass rising to my thighs, and felt my pulse slow — not from exhaustion, but from alignment. My thoughts, which in waking life dart like startled birds, folded their wings.
There was no rent to make.
No productivity to simulate.
No comparison flickering at the edge of sight.
The sky did not appraise me.
For the first time, my mind did not demand a future from me. It did not drag me backward by the collar into past mistakes. It lay down in the meadow of itself and rested.
How calm I was.
And yet — it shames me, this calm. It shames me that it required collapse. What does it say of me, that ruin feels like mercy?
I do not like to complain. The word suggests petulance, ingratitude. But what is complaint if not a nerve speaking when pressed too long? If I say I am weary, it is not because I despise the world. It is because I feel it grinding against the tender parts of me. If I say I long for grass between the towers, it is because the concrete has entered my lungs.
—
In the dream, I reached the center of the city — that old epicenter of anxiety — and found only wind bending the tall grass in long, tidal motions. The earth had resumed its patient work. Roots braided themselves beneath the pavement. They did not hurry. They did not negotiate.
Night rose. The sky, no longer bleached by our restless light, opened slowly, as though it had been holding itself in reserve behind the city’s feverish glare. Where neon once bruised the dark and billboards burned like false constellations, the vastness deepened, breathing again. One by one, the stars resumed their ancient positions — patient, innumerable and unashamed — slipping back into the firmament. They had been there all along, waiting behind the brightness we mistook for brilliance. When the artificial stars went out, the real ones returned.
They did not perform.
I stood very still.
For a moment, I felt something perilous: relief.
Not the bright relief of achievement, but the dark relief of being released. Released from proving, from striving, from being endlessly visible. It frightened me, how sweet it was.
When I woke, the hum returned at once — the subtle vibration of expectation in the walls, the glow at the edge of the curtain. My phone blinked. The clock resumed its pressure. The world had not ended.
But beneath the pavement, I know the roots continue their patient work.
They are moving even now, in the dark, splitting what we thought was permanent.
They do not ask permission.