Building 72 “Seeing Red”

They made me promise not to write about it, but I can't keep silent anymore. The longer I let this sit inside me, the worse it becomes, and the more the pain returns. It is never as bad as the first time, but that is the point. The fact it never gets as bad means the threat is always there, as I can never get used to it. There is never a moment to try and fight through.

It burns. My flesh, my eyes, and my skin, like I am being bathed in firelight, coals biting into my face and arms. It hurts, but I know it can get worse. Because it has been worse.

We all talk about the moment of exposure, the time when we realized that something wasn't right and that the pain we were going to feel was going to haunt us. And it bothered me when I heard those stories. Because mostly I did not feel the pain that the rest of us did, and that made me feel like an imposter. It can't possibly be true, that I am caught up in all of this.

Because most of the time, I wasn't hurting.

At least, that is how it was.

But now it isn't.

I see the sun in the sky, and it is red, and the world is colder. It happened so quickly. There was not a lurch or a shudder. We all woke up this morning, and the sun was red, and the winters chill is deeper than the night before. Most people are trying to dismiss it out of hand, and I don't think they see it as normal. That there is an explanation, and we simply have to find it. I think people simply have lives to live, and something like this, thinking about it, gets in the way of what needs to be done.

The sun is dying.

I can tell.

I am thankful I made it stateside before things got bad. I can't imagine how hard it would have been if I had tried to take a plane with things as they are now. A few places are shutting down, but things can get worse, and often do. No one seems to want to really understand what is happening. So many places you would think would be closed by now aren't.

I suppose I should be thankful. I have to find you. No matter how long it takes.

When I was little, I used to dream a lot. I would wake up each morning with a new story, and would often share them over the breakfast table, which I was lucky enough to have parents who tolerated it. They would talk with me about it, and when it was a bad dream they would try to convince me that there was no such thing as this thing or that, or would tell me that I was simply scared of something that was unlikely to happen.

There is nothing in the closet. There is nothing under the bed. Mommy and Daddy will be here for a long time.

They were very good about it, and always had an answer for whatever strange thing I would bring up over whatever leftovers we were working on from the night before.

Then I had a dream about the sun...

I was in the darkness of space, looking out at the stars and the infinite blackness. I enjoyed astronomy, and took some time identifying the various constellations I was able to make out, though I found it harder and harder as I went along. There were simply too many stars, far more than I was used to.

All the while, I could feel this growing heat building behind me. I was not breathing. I did not feel the need to breathe. There was no sense of cold, except in a general way, less the way the void of space would feel and more like a cool summer day. But the heat behind me grew, and soon against my will I found myself turning around to face the source of the heat.

The blinding, terrible light of the sun greeted me, and though I put my hands up in protest, they could do little to block it out, the light rendering the veins of my hands visible, the bones standing starkly against my flesh. The heat kept on building, as the light seemed to pulse and shift. All at once I realized I wasn't breathing, and the pain of holding my breath became agony as the sun got hotter and hotter.

Brighter and brighter.

Soon there was pain, as I could now see the sun burning up my hands, the skin pealing away against of onslaught of cascading fire. I started screaming, but that just allowed the fire to travel down my throat and into my lungs...

And then I woke up.

I told my parents about it over breakfast, but they were left speechless. At the time, and as I got older, I just assumed that something like that is simply too weird for someone to respond to. You could say that I wasn't in space, that the sun is normal. Anything like that. But it would hardly be a complete answer.

If someone has a nightmare about something under the bed, you look under the bed and show them that everything was alright.

You look under the skin of a person, you see something about them that you were not prepared for. When you do that, there is so little left to be done.

It is simply something you get used to or something you reject.

I am so sorry I waited so long. You were honest with me, and I wasn't with you. I did it because I was scared, and now it is too late.

It is getting colder.

I love you.

Please wait for me.