in the months leading up to it, i had the same dream every single night: a rustic, idyllic landscape, leaves gently wafting to the ground. the play that children play. and somewhere, underground, a countdown; when it reached its conclusion, annihilation. nuclear or otherwise, life utterly snuffed out in light and fire.
eventually even my young child's brain picked up on the pattern, but howling for help or trying to raise awareness did nothing. even if i could communicate the message of what's coming, I couldn't delay it! and so, each night I would dream of hopelessness and helplessness, and wake in confusion, until the day the dreams stopped and he died. our father left just a few months later.
To this day, like many of the other elements that make up a life, I have to wonder why this happened. the easy answer to reach for is the supernatural, a future-seeing. perhaps instead this dream, repeated dozens and dozens of times, was a rut my mind had gotten into, and a totally unrelated shock broke me out of the pattern. but twenty-five years later, no explanation i have yet yields a kind of satisfaction