The first time the Earth died, along with most everything else I imagine, I was taken by surprise. It was Tuesday, November 1 2022 and I had just gotten off my work from home job and was heading out to purchase some milk and bread. As I was standing by my car fishing for my keys I felt an almost static charge go through my body, almost like when a lightning storm is about to start. I looked up at the sky and see it shifting and swirling like an ocean in a hurricane. As I watched it, confusion not quite giving away to terror, the sky turned purple as the colors swirled, commingled, and eventually gave way to the brilliant black sky like the day had just given away to the darkest night.
Now at this point I’m sure my terror would have come in full force had I not begun to feel incredibly drowsy. I kept my eyes pinned on the now empty black depths of what was, just a moment ago, the regular late afternoon sky, but I began to feel so very tired and then I was falling, falling, falling and….
My phone’s alarm woke me up out of a dead sleep. At first I couldn’t make heads or tails out of anything and in that moment the primal terror did come back, at least until I realized that I was safe in my bed and everything appeared to be good and right with the world. Why had my alarm woken me up? It was Tuesday, and I always slept in on Tuesday. I opened my clock app on my phone and it said the date was actually Tuesday, November 1, 2022. Then I remembered the dream. Oh, lord. I had only dreamt that I had worked my Friday, and then the whole dream came back to me so very clearly and I was filled with that thank-god-it-was-only-a-dream feeling and, while I was disappointed that I had to work again, I was grateful that the end of the world only boiled down to having an all too spicy dinner.
I chuckled to myself as I headed downstairs while still trying to shake that uneasy feeling one gets when waking from an intense dream. I was still chuckling when my first call came in then it was pushed to the back-burner of my mind while I fell into the days’ routine. Before I knew it I was done with the workday and ready to clock out.
I signed out of work and began having a conversation about the nights’ festivities. Our best friend Wayne was due over for a night of video games so dinner was going to be an easy affair. Hamburgers from a favorite restaurant then bedtime for our daughter, then a much needed gab sesh. The day concluded peacefully enough and our friend came over. It was about 30 minutes in while watching a Planet Earth episode that I remembered my dream about planet earth and I belted out with “Oh shit guys I had a crazy dream last night!”
Wayne chuckled and said “That’s so funny, so did I, but you go first.”
I began recounting my dream and as I told it first Wayne and then my husband Finn lost their grins and as I carried on each one looked more confused. When I finished my dream Wayne spoke “I have no idea how that’s even possible but we had very similar dreams. Finn nodded and stated “Me too.”
We sat in confused maybe shocked silence for a short while and then the hair on the back of my neck began to stand up I looked at my compatriots and Finn whispered a gobsmacked “no” and went to the door grabbing the doorknob. He looked pointedly at me and pulled the door open only to stare into the swirling skies that were already beginning to dissipate into black. The second time the Earth died I was properly terrified. Finn turned and ran up the stairs for our daughter’s room with me at his heels. We went into her room to find her asleep as we silently sat beside her bed. There were no words and nothing to be done. If this was a premonition of the end, then we had both known where we wanted to spend it.
Finn rested his hand on our daughter’s back and another on mine as we sat wordlessly, knowingly, resignedly. I could hear our friend standing at the open door taking a long drag from his vape. I guess he had chosen where he wanted to greet the end as well. I began to feel very tired again and didn’t try to fight it as I lay my head on my daughter’s bed and I was falling, falling……..
“Rhea! Rhea!” I felt insistent shaking on my shoulder. I Opened my eyes to the scared pale face of Finn and it all came back. Finn explained that when our daughter had woken him around 5AM for breakfast he had told her that it was a bit to early and to sleep for a while longer, he had rolled over, and then remembered yesterday. He opened his laptop only to see that it was the wee hours of Tuesday, November 1st and had decided to wake me up to see if I remembered November 1st at all. He looked at me with an almost desperate hope in his eyes. Almost like his natural logic and pragmatism were at war with what he had vividly experienced twice now. I felt so guilty that I had to be the person to ruin that hope. I briefly thought about feigning ignorance but knew that it would be completely pointless. We both know that the truth will come out and sooner rather than later.
I pulled in a breathe that broke as a strangled sob and then another one. My body silently shook while I almost choked on the truth. On the horror of it all. My husband didn’t need words from me to know what my answer was to his question. He grabbed me into a tight hug and held me for a while. While we were close he whispered insistently “We can’t let Bug (our daughter) know…..we just can’t. I don’t even know if I accept it yet.”
I nodded into his shoulder. There would be no need to scare her. Even if faced with what we were pretty sure would happen tonight, we had to let her remain innocent of this.
We went about our day as normally as possible save that I called in for work. If I’m about to die in an unexplained cosmic event, I wanted to spend my remaining time with my family. At noon a pounding came on our door. It was Wayne coming to go over what had transpired sort of yesterday. For starters he was kind of annoyed we hadn’t woken him when the first of us got up, but it hadn’t occurred to either of us at the time. He quickly lost his annoyance though which was only a cover for his own apprehension and terror of the entire situation at hand.
At this point we were more or less sure that this is not a dream and that the others were probably not a dream as none had felt dreamlike. The experience was shared by all of us, but as far as we knew, nobody else, or at least not many as the world seemed to go on like normal. No massive riots, or at least not any that don’t happen for the usual things. It would stand to reason, then, that we are pretty likely to wake up tomorrow and it would be the 1st again. While all of this did indeed scare the absolute shit out of me, I did find a perverse comfort that at least I’d wake up at the beginning of it.
Tonight we spent the last night on earth playing video games with Bug and laughing. We made sure to tuck her in well before the show and spent our last hours together batting around ideas about what happened and why we seem to be caught up in it. When the end came we were pretty tired anyway. The third time the Earth died I felt optimistic and curious.
I was once again woken up by Finn. It wasn’t as urgent, and when I looked into his face it wasn’t scared or drained of color. I drove over to Wayne’s house and after an awkward conversation with his groggy father I was able to get him to wake up Wayne under the pretense of a babysitting emergency. As soon as Wayne had opened his eyes he had jumped out of bed and headed straight to the door in his pajamas stating that he might as well be comfy this time. We spent the entire day playing together with bug and in between, when she would go off into her own playland world we would go into more detail on our theories from the previous night.
Finn, a fan of Groundhog’s Day, had his theory which was definitely understandable and after the last few “days” not altogether strange. There were a couple other ideas not really worth bringing up. Mostly cobbled together scifi tropes commingled with a little hard science, because we were not scientists and at this point were grasping for anything.
The settled upon theory was that instead of moving forward in time we were just moving sideways through different, identical universes reliving the same day over and over. Every day was the 1st , but people didn’t all behave the same. The days were not exactly the same. While it was still the same day, other than the date it was a slightly different experience each time.
That night, the fourth night we chose to lay in the field next to our house and watch the skies swirl. This time when the Earth died I felt at peace.
We’re still not sure exactly what is happening to us or what is happening to the world. Each day, while different, ends the same. I decided to call it Dreamtime after the aboriginal concept. We did stand at the end which is also a beginning, just a beginning we are doubtful to ever see.
Once we were sure this wasn’t our end in the way we had always understood we tried introducing Bug to our Dreamtime to see if she could remember like we could. After a few nights under the swirling colors she approached and asked if we could stay up to watch the purple clouds again. I smiled and told her of course we could. We could do it every night if she would like.
We actually did take a cue from Groundhog’s day and kept track by reading a page in a book. We consumed all the books in our personal library, the library in our small town, and the small town next to ours before we stopped counting.
I’m not sure how long we’ve been exactly. Once Wayne said by his math over a thousand years before we stopped counting. Time hasn’t meant much to us since it stopped applying for the most part.
We don’t age for obvious reasons. We don’t get sick, and we’re not afraid. I don’t know if I will ever know what is happening to us, but it has gone on for so long that any life before it feels almost like the dream now.
I remember hearing when I grew up that heaven is where you get to spend a perfect day that never ends with the people you love and while I don’t know if any of this is intentional or just an unexplainable cosmic event that our species was not advanced enough to understand, by definition what we have is heaven. And when the Dreamtime comes for us at night and I gaze up at the sky I am okay whether or not this is actually our last day
The world died and I am not afraid anymore.