A Dream I once had.

So I wake up and I’m in a really blank apartment. Bare white walls, the sofa I’m laying on is white, the carpet is white- when I say it the apartment sounds sort of sterile in a heavenly way but that’s not what it’s like. This isn’t a pristine, holy white- it’s a dead white. Like if all the lifeblood could be drained from an apartment, this is what it would look like.
Anyway, I’m on the sofa and I look round for the source of my consciousness- and it’s my younger brother, Truth. He looks really eager and nervous. And there’s something else, something off. I ask him what’s wrong and he does his signature “uncomfortable” face and takes me to look out the window.
We’re maybe fifty stories up and my belly squirms with vertigo. Outside has the same deadness as the apartment only there’s an enormous commotion. People rioting- and not in a rebellious way. They all just look confused. It’s not like they’re trying to destroy the world, it’s like they’re trying to destroy themselves because they don’t know what else to do. I go to exchange a concerned look with Truth but he smirks at me and says, “We won’t die.”
I don’t know what he means by this so I ignore it but then he jumps out the window. Fifty stories up and he just jumps right out like it’s nothing. I feel like I’m the one plummeting. When he hits the pavement with a wrenching crunch of broken bones, he gets right back up and looks up at me and waves. Sigh, okay- it’s okay- he’s okay. But I’m not about to follow suit so I take the elevator.
There’s two men in the elevator: Man number one keeps shooting himself in the head, he raises the gun to his crown, pulls the trigger, the bullet rushed through his head, but there’s no blood: no blood, no brain particles, no chunks of skull, nothing. His head jerks back and before he can hit the ground he pops back into the starting position, gun in hand, ready to repeat the process over again, and he does. The other is repeatedly walking into the walls. There’s no talking to these people- they’re completely useless in this state.
Truth runs up to me when I come outside. I can tell that he’s scared but amused. Hundreds of people are in the street, and they’re all trying to kill themselves. They’re running in front of cars, slitting their wrists, nooses hang from every branch of every tree- but nobody is dying.
“What happened to everyone?” I ask Truth, my gaze fixed on a man in a jeep who keeps driving into the same brick building. Truth bites his lip and follows my gaze- the jeep hits the building and the man sort of bounces off the airbag, reverses, then starts it over.
“I think we’re already dead,” Truth answers. I nod distractedly and scan the rest of the crowd but my eyes snap back to Truth. I notice he has a slitting scar across his throat and I see that everyone- every person in the crowd has the same scar. I feel my neck and I’ve got it too.
A blonde guy with a kitchen knife stumbles up to me. I realize that he’s wearing the same expression as everyone else: it’s like a bewildered stupidity. I get the impression that everyone woke up like I did but over the course of the day they lost their minds. It looks like they’re all stuck in a loop. At any rate, the blonde guy’s loop is stabbing himself in the abdomen. He falls into me and I catch him at first but the sight of his idiot face is disgusting so I let him drop.
Truth and I wordlessly agree that we should keep moving so we start walking down the street, dodging the suicidal lunatics. We reach a point where the road veers right and Truth jumps out of the way to not be run over by a Buick Le Sabre- but I’m not so quick as that. I use a tree branch to pull myself up onto the hood and there’s a balding man and his family inside, looking truly horrified. I lunge off the hood into the grass- which is green but with a loss of saturation, like sun damage on an old photo.
There’s a creek past the trees where people are attempting to drown themselves- I shake my head bemusedly. We trudge on without a destination in mind and we see two people we definitely recognize.
Mum and dad with the same scars and expressions as the rest of these maniacs. They look like they’re caught in a loop of killing each other, which is refreshing. Truth throws me an exasperated glance and I know what he’s saying: “Everyone else is killing themselves but mum and dad are at each other. Typical.”
And I’ve lost it. And I wake up and the Fords are eating waffles.