I was sitting in my parents bedroom tucking them in. I don’t do that ever, for the record, so I don’t know where that came from. All of the sudden, I “heard” something from behind their room, the side where the window isn’t.
“Emily’s here!” I said, jumping up and down. “Please can I go outside and see her?”
My dad gave me a look, but my mom said yes.
The scene changes. I’m outside my house, and I’m sitting down at a picnic table (that we don’t actually have) next to a light pole covered in ivy (that we do have). Emily and her roommate Fallon were there. We all talked, and as the night went on, people started appearing.
Someone suggests playing a game. By this point, there’s 6 or 7 people there. It involved sparklers.
The scene changes. We’re standing in front of the neighbors front door, like we’re expecting something to happen. Something does and it’s bad.
The scene changes. We’re running an underground shelter from my basement. People keep pouring in from the unknown. The 6 or 7 of us haven’t seen daylight in weeks. Or maybe months, I don’t remember. Someone wants to bring a dog with them but we just don’t have the room. It comes anyways.
The mothers with small children stay on the bottom bottom floor, through a couple of hidden doors. They’re all crying and complaining and I don’t know what to do, even though they sent me downstairs because I’m supposed to be the expert. Most of the mothers are glaring at me. They don’t understand why they never get news of the outside world.
“Why can’t you just tell us what’s going on?” They don’t understand. It’s bad out there, whatever that means.
I crawl into bed with a couple of children who are crying and want their mommy, who isn’t with them. I don’t know what else to do. They hold onto my arms like I’m the one that can save them.
I wish I could.
The scene changes. I’m in my dorm room with someone who isn’t my roommate. We have a huge bathroom to ourselves. There’s war going on outside, and I’m powerful. I’ve got the power to do something. I don’t know what. Stop the terror?
I’m too cocky. I have a God complex. I won’t do anything but stay in the room and protect myself and pick fights with my roomie. We argue constantly.
The scene changes. My roommate is gone. She’s had enough. Something happens in the bathroom. I battle. I win.
The scene changes. I’m hanging out with some of the international students I worked with this summer. Everything looks like we’d been hit by the atomic bomb, except 10 years after the fact. Buildings burned during the Civil War and rebuilt have somehow stood the test of time and made it through this atomic bomb. It’s my friend’s birthday and we’re standing outside her building, hanging out on steps that go up a hill. People from my high school are there. There’s a debate over the cake, but miraculously someone made one. We have no idea how they got the ingredients. We’re going to go up to the room when —
I wake up. And that’s my dream.
