In the Last of Those Days
Journal Entry: Tuesday, November 11, 2025 – 5:46am
There was a bright star shining, though perhaps it was not a star but the remnant of a thought that refused to fade. It trembled there with the brilliance of a long-anticipated event, the heavens themselves had awaited this moment for centuries. It hung in the deep-blue sky, a picture of splendor that rivaled the dream cities we once spoke of in hushed tones - cities of marble and vapor, where every street turned toward delight.
The world shimmered like crystal, cities made of dreams, streets spiraling inward toward themselves, towers of sighs and fountains of absence. Everything gleamed with the epicurean delight of paradise - tasted once and never again. The air was thick with mellow light.
I basked in the sunshine, content without reason, until life began to crystallize into a thousand ambitions like morning dew on blades of grass. I could see through each one, bright, transparent, impossible. How fragile they all seemed, gleaming like beads before the morning light. It was impossible ever again - that world we had known - in the last of those days when an enchantingly wavering attitude still passed for grace, and an intellectual romancing that made even sorrows luminous.
There was a melodious voice then, drifting from somewhere, exquisitely modulated to tremble when I listened closely. It spoke of loyalty and loss, that blood was thicker than broth, yet thinner than moonlight, of inheritances both tender and absurd. The voice carried a curious strain of weakness running crosswise through strength, like the fissured hum of a bell that still rings true. It said, Tenderness is a strength; a doorway through which the heart enters its own house. The words turned to vapor as I reached to grasp them.
Moons whirled and swayed above, pale lamps reflecting the other’s trembling. Beneath their silver pull, the sea rose with the straining, glorious heroism of plunging and crashing, beating back the tide as if it could resist the pale pearls’ powerful yearning. From afar we heard the rolling of thunder - like a memory rehearsing its entrance.
The air was thick and exotic with intrigue. Unseen orchestras played waltzes in half-forgotten gardens. Violins swelled and quavered on their last notes confessing something fragile and forbidden. Cellos sighed to the moon, their sound like blue velvet. We knew then the dream was ending, drenched as we were in silver moonlight, drifting far into the crisp autumnal twilight, where all that ever mattered folded quietly into silence. The air shimmered with adventure, with the perfume of endings disguised as beginnings.
It was the hour of wonder. The waltzes slowed, and the light of the moons, swollen with tenderness, began to thin. I found myself walking through a garden that was both ruin and revelation. Petals trembled on their stems, each one glowing with the afterthought of color, each one holding tenuously to its branch as if life hesitated to loose its grasp.
The star above had softened, it too understood the futility of shining forever. Its light no longer pierced the world; it gently embraced. The sky rippled like silk across a dying fire. All shimmered with an ache particular to beauty when it begins to fray.
I heard laughter in the distance, familiar voices fading like songs overheard from another lifetime. The dream cities were still there, but their marble towers had begun to lean inward, gently, toward Hypnos. Windows glowed with farewell. Bridges hummed with the quiet footsteps of ghosts crossing back into oblivion. I thought, So, this is how endings begin.
The voice returned, fainter now, as if speaking through water. You will forget, but what fades is not lost. I wanted to believe that. I wanted to gather every falling petal and place them one by one into the Book of Relics of what had once been beautiful. But the wind did not agree.
All at once, the garden became a whirlwind of motion, leaves and stars and fragments of melody, each circling and descending, mingling into the slow drift of dissolution. I felt myself among them, crumbling with exquisite precision.
And yet, in the act of falling apart, everything seemed to shine more brightly. The bloom of the world had opened beyond reason, past perfection, into its last and fullest display. Creation wavered, radiant and trembling, on the edge of its own disappearance.
The violins whispered one final phrase, too delicate to name. The cellos bowed into silence. Moonlight and shadow settled over the ruins like forgiveness. I stood in awe, knowing that even decay was an act of devotion, that the petals would feed the roots of dreams yet unimagined.
Somewhere, beneath the horizon of consciousness, the bright star winked once more, a farewell or perhaps a promise, before vanishing into the soft and holy dark.
The dream unraveled, thread by luminous thread. Its colors dimmed and dulled, its sounds receded into that strange stillness where memory becomes nothing more than a sensation of lost wholeness. The orchestras folded their wings, and the star, once so vivid, so impossibly alive, slipped beneath the horizon of the mind.
I felt it fading, as shadows reached into the night, where all images go to rest. What remained was only the faint scent of moonlight, the echo of violins quivering through the hollows. An exquisite sorrow touched me then, quiet and unresisting, like the melancholy of a garden seen in bloom for the last time.
I opened my eyes. The first light of the sun like a hallo over the serrated edge of the high desert mountains. The world, newly born and impossibly ordinary, stood before me, scrub brush and stone and the drift of a hawk’s wings in the sky.
For a moment I could not tell if I had awakened or merely passed into another dream. The bed beneath me felt both real and dissolving. I recalled the bright star and the music and the falling petals in the garden and wondered whether the dream had been the truer world and this, with its coarse daylight and gravity, the illusion.
I sat up slowly, the sheets warm against my skin, and listened to the silence as if it were about to speak or sing. Perhaps, I thought, there is no border between dreaming and waking, only the shifting of light upon the same vast fabric. Perhaps both realms breathe each other’s air, trading shapes in the eternal rhythm of creation rising into crescendos of vivid beauty then falling into forgetfulness.
Outside, the morning unfolded like a rose at the very edge of its perfection. The clouds luminous pinks and oranges against the deep blue. And as the sun crested the mountain, I felt that strange union of grief and gratitude, the ache of being alive in a world forever passing away and forever beginning anew.