text: Night had felt even more desolate than normal, the air in my bedroom was hot, stagnant, heavy with dust suffocating me under my half removed blanket. Outside from the nearby window, I could hear nothing. The static searing of the empty void pounded against my ears as the damp, sweat covered sheets stuck to my body. I had been laying here for hours, but how many hours had it been? It was the period of night that you should be asleep for, the overbearing sense of disconnection, darkness, the only feelings surrounding you are those of the unwashed blankets encompassing your body, and the pain in your neck from the pillow that flattened hours ago. Tomorrow would have been terrible if the early morning had held anything for me, a few hours of oversleeping would hardly be a problem. The sleep did not come easily. Visions of suffocation plagued my mind throughout the night. I felt the sense of time pass, how long exactly I had no idea. I felt existence in that void of reality, a reality of fever ensued machinations, of far off deserts and sweltering labyrinths of all matter of horrors that I could not remember, but experienced in every way. There was no other night that had felt so long, so lucid, surreal but impossible. I experienced every moment in those hours, reality becoming cross with the unnameable things that asphyxiated my mind and prevented any possibility of rest. When I awoke my mind was overrun. Suggestions of dreams, memories of nightmares, my mind quickly forgetting them as I came to, repeating to myself what was real, what held consequence in this world and what was nothing more than a product of my overheated mind. I came to realize the sun peering into my room. Beams of orange light pierced through every crack in my blinds and curtain, each dust particle ignited like ash from a blazing fire. This was no cool morning sun, not a white drape to slowly wake me in its crystalline warmth, this light was blinding dark orange that signaled the suns peak. A fiery gaze looking down upon me. How late is it, how late had I slept? My mind was already fogged with the vestigial events of the night and I could not gather my sense of time. I understood that I would be waking up later, perhaps an hour more even though it would truly be an hour less. Daylight savings time had come, and the distortion of time could have very easily effected my sleep, but not to this caliber. The clock on my bedside showed late evening. Before sleeping I had set it only an hour forward, if the clock was correct, I had slept nearly 16 hours. 16 hours was unprecedented, and simply losing an hour would not have caused that. My stiff muscles and locked joints felt as if it had been days, my greasy, matted hair almost stuck to the damp pillow sheet, my blanket sodden with sweat. Was the night truly that stressful, to keep me asleep for hours on end only to gain no rest? Something else had pierced my senses, there was no sound. In the late evening the sounds of gatherings and day workers returning home would be blaring outside my window, but there was nothing. Not a laugh nor a shout, there were no roaring engines or horns blaring. It was a cause with potential outcomes startling enough to force me from my bed, to my window, and quickly after I had seen what lay beyond it, I would rather return back to my fever dreams and the comfort of false reality. It had taken me a moment to understand that this was not just another dream. I was truly awake, truly experiencing the physical senses lost in nightmares: pain, discomfort, hunger, all while the pressing sense of emotional turmoil came down on me from that one glimpse outside the window. It truly had not just been an hour, the clocks had not gone forward, nor backward, it had not been a day, a week, a month or a year. No amount of time within my ability to comprehend it could have done this. All sense of modesty was gone, and I stepped outside half naked, I had to know it was real. With my own eyes I saw it, and I truly believed I was the last able to. A forest of desolation, a desert enveloping the last remaining suggestions of the civilized world I saw not more than an hour before I slept. Towering buildings crumbled against each other, the red sun penetrating each broken window as it sunk down beyond the horizon, leaving nothing but a sickened orange sky, bare of any streak or cloud that might have filled it on a normal day. Rationality in my mind had left me, answers could not be had, it had been a no more than five minutes since I had woken up. I walked through the old street that sand and rock had all but tore away, the metal beams of posts and the bodies of the few remaining vehicles stood as nothing but shells of rust, each gust of wind tearing away another piece. Nothing could be heard but the wind and the sand it carried, tearing against my pale skin as I walked down the road into the city. My eyes burned in adjustment, black scars blotted my already blurry vision, squinting at every window, every door and every object that once suggested hospitality in the hopes that some answers would reveal themselves. Answers for questions I couldn't ask, and no man, woman, or any living creatures presented itself, nor did the remains of any. No bodies could be seen, not even the bleached bones of a long forgotten street beggar peered from the shallow sands. No bodies, no remains, no signs of destruction or war. Simply the wind, consuming everything. Feelings of hunger and weakness pressed upon me, but it did not stop me from traversing the city. Every street, every skyscraper, vehicle and shop was identical to the previous, an unrecognizable maze of rusting metal, and concrete shells. The city ended abruptly, where the highway would take you was now little more than an endless wasteland of stone pillars and metal rods. A desolate stretch of highway could be seen, black pieces of old road in a suggestive path that suddenly ends. Where the old road ended, I could see nothing beyond the horizon but the sky of orange, darkness slowly revealing itself as the sun fell out of sight. When the sun ended, a new light revealed itself beyond the old road. One that grew in intensity as I came closer to the end, a red beacon shooting up into the star filled sky from underneath a horizon that was lost to me in the darkness. Until I came to the end of the old road. I could see it there, a black pillar of no shape, projecting its beacon into the sky from the crater beyond the horizon. As I starred at it, my vision cleared and my anxieties dispersed, I could no longer feel the heat against my neglected body, nor the ache of hunger and the pain that once resonated from my every movement. All the answers to the questions I did not have presented themselves to me. The beauty of this thing brought me to it, it brought all of us to it, down into the crater where we could be close, where the sweltering heat was replaced with a resonating peace and indifference. Where we could all exist with it, with a singular purpose as the lesser beings to look upon it, and bathe it its eternal beauty.