May 7, 2019

The latest tweet on her Twitter feed began with “Dear @Clark…” and was projected onto a large wall. I felt a wave of embarrassment wash over me. A tweet had been mistakenly directed at me despite the fact that we hadn’t talked in years. I was deeply ashamed of this fact.

–

It was my uncle’s birthday and I was in charge of bringing cake. I walked into the bakery just as it was about to close and looked over their selection of cakes on display. I picked out two ice cream cakes, one vanilla flavored and another fudge, which was labeled “Fireworks”. I asked the person at the counter to write “Happy Birthday” on the fudge cake and decided at the last moment to buy another cake for myself.

I took the shortcut home this time, which went through an abandoned metro station that ran under the tennis courts. Since this was technically trespassing, we also needed to pay a 100 RMB bribe. I expressed my anxieties over getting caught with the people walking next to me. “It’s fine”, they said, “thousands of people pass through here everyday and hundreds of thousands of goods are transported. They won’t remember us.”

The underground tunnel resurfaced in the middle of a junkyard of abandoned goods. Packages were still being delivered to the site via drones with balloons attached to them.

–

I carried my niece on my shoulders down the stairs of a dried up riverbank. “I can see the end of the world!” she said excitedly. When we got to the bottom, I took out a notebook from my pocket and flipped through the pages.

“Another dream journal?” a voice said.

I looked up and saw a woman with an unamused expression.

“That’s not very safe, you know”, she continued, “the world is ending.”