Elegy of an End

The flutes whisper to me. I can feel their multifaceted chorus of infinite chords pounding through my mind, their song blowing the world to dust, murmuring sweet nothings in my ear as I try and stand. But I don’t understand the concept. My mind appears foggy, shrouded in incomprehension as I try and fathom such monotonous actions like ‘standup’. For where does Up end and Down begin, in a world of nothing?
I feel so alive, so tired so…animated. My world is a specter and I am the sole proprietor of reality; but I can already feel myself crumbling, the ground beneath me slipping away into the dark recesses of naught. The song I hear is pounding in my head, getting louder all the time, getting so quiet I fear I might break the musical spell if I so much as think. Is this what death is like? My mournful milieu spirals to life in a haze of sentiment:

There’s a woman screaming in the shadows. I can hear her voice reaching out to me from across this medium of reality, and I go in search of its source. It’s so dark, but I use her violent, harassed melody as my guide. Tree branches and shrubs crack and sway in front of and behind me, and I can feel twigs snapping under my careless strides as I sprint through the forested undergrowth. Apart from the quiet bluster of the wind and my feet shifting noisily on the earth, there is no sound at all. None of the nocturnal happenings one would expect to hear in a forest at night. I continue to tear my way through the foliage, my lungs crying out for oxygen. The jet black earth beneath my feet I imagine doesn’t even exist except in my head. Only the sounds I hear are real, a tune whistling to the rhythm of the flutes. The shrieks of the fallen woman rise and fall in time to their arpeggio, and they continue to get louder as I move nearer and nearer the source.

A burning house looms ahead of me, lighting up the edge of the forest. The glow from the fire strokes the nearby trees delicately, almost corporeally. I walk toward it, and with a thought, I’m there, inside the house. The fire is still burning, but unnaturally. Its black flames lick the walls without effect, and I myself remain untouched. All I can feel is the wind, blowing through the cracks in the empty, desolate building. Shadows morph and cower in the flames, reaching out vehemently to claim me, their efforts brushing against me like water on rock. The dark jury awaits my judgment with a collective cry that shakes perpetuity. The agonised, pure resonance reverberates back and forth through me and through everything. The woman, curled up on the wooden floor in a fetal manner, twitches to life. I stare down at her, at her clothes and I suddenly realise that I know her. My wife, my myth, a vision of what is lost, her body emblazoned in fire; in dust and bone and ash. I’m vaguely aware that this realisation should shock me, but such emotion seems distant to me now, like a memory of your life as you were at the age of four. Her auburn hair is in disarray as she tries to stand, facing away from me. We stand there for a while, an eternity, still and impassive in each others presence. And then she turns around, whispers my name which I know should be impossible. A myth turned to flesh, awake to the world in the arms of my imagination, in this parody of existence, facing me, faceless. No mouth to call my name, no eyes to see me, just a blank smooth canvas of skin. And I notice something else, in my fixated horror. The flutes have ceased their tune.

I awake screaming to the sound of fire and death, as the sirens in the sky sing their merry songs of demise. Déjà vu washes over me, and a thought inserts itself rigidly in my head. This is my requiem, a lament of my end. I stand up and look out the window, smiling at my last day on earth.