Welcome to Another Day in the World

I woke up choking on dust again. It creeps into my lungs, settles in my throat, turns my breath into something brittle and dry. The sun rises over a world that’s forgotten how to live. It burns everything it touches, but the cold—it lingers in the bones.

I dreamt of the old world last night. Of streets that hummed with life. Of voices that carried laughter instead of screams. I saw green fields, stretching farther than my eyes could follow, and water that ran clear, reflecting skies unstained by smoke. I don’t know why my mind clings to memories that aren’t even mine. Stories passed down like relics, whispered in the dark, as if speaking them aloud might make them real again.

But dreams are nothing more than ghosts.

And today, I walk among ruins. A barren cracked earth. Buildings that once stood tall, now husks, ribcages of a civilization that collapsed under its own weight. The wasteland doesn’t mourn. It simply exists. And I exist within it, dragging myself forward, day after day, step after step, because stopping means becoming part of the wreckage.

I remember the last night of my innocence. Over twenty journeys ‘round the sun, and yet, it feels like it ended in an instant. The moment I saw the truth. The moment I understood that the world I’d been promised was a lie. The sickness came first—the plagues that wiped the weak from the map. Then the hunger, the war, the bombs. They thought it was a test of faith. A reckoning. They prayed while the air turned black, while the rivers turned to poison.

And when the end came, they called it absolution.

I call it cowardice.

The sun is higher now, bleaching the bones of the world. I tell myself not to dwell on the past. Don’t give any power to yesterday. It doesn’t change what’s in front of me.

Another day in the wasteland.

Another step toward nothing.

Blinking hard to clear the sleep
The morning sunlight blinded
Fields fallow, bleached and dried
A broken barren patchwork
Abandoned and derelict
Cracked and weed overgrown
Littered with debris
Wintered and leached of soul

Welcome to another day in the world

I thought of last night’s dream
Of the last night of my innocence
Over twenty journeys round the sun
Yet feeling instantaneous
“Don’t dwell on it,” I chide myself
“Don’t give any power to the yesterdays”
Sunshine is the forecast for today
Tomorrow, and the next few centuries

The world known to my kin
Lost and gone forever
As dead as the moral, social fabric
That supposedly held it together
The desire to preserve
Determination to enforce
Actions from within themselves
Attributed to an abstract source

How hard it was for them
To see the truth purblinded
When the plagues killed billions in a stroke
Their faith remained misguided
The air so foul the water’s pollution
Only when the bombs fell…
Absolution