My apocalyptic visions recur every two weeks. 

The first happened when I was five. In the dream, I put on my mother’s red lipstick. She grew so angry she took off her wedding ring and ran away to join a pack of wolves. When I found her in the forest, her language was gone. The wolves didn’t want me. This felt like an apocalypse. 

Apocalypses are contamination events. A foreign substance permeates your world, and destroys it from the inside out. 

At around fourteen, I developed an obsession with the climate crisis. I gave up all meat and ruminated about microplastics. I developed a parasocial relationship with marine bivalves, especially the Mytilus edulis. The Blue Mussel. 

At this time, I was visited nightly by the undead. I would run for miles, take shelter in a hollowed-out Walmart. This became my night-shift, the running. In the mornings I would wake up to the corporeal stench of my household’s pent-up aggression, then tip-toe around ammunition cases stockpiled just-in-case–Dooms Day prepping– to go to a school where one way or another I was always the strange one. 

I thought that mussels and clams were evolutionary miracles– and tragedies. With a self-made adhesive that rivals any human attempts at biodegradable glue, Mytilus edulis sticks itself to the slippery substances of the ocean floor, and braves rough tides. They survive by filter feeding, by purifying the ocean water.

As the level of microplastics in the ocean grows, so does the amount that filters through the Mytilus edulis. The plastic particles get stuck in their tubes, gum up their organs. It is making them infertile. They cannot move out of the ocean, they cannot change how they eat. Stuck and forced– I related.

The dead-without-rest infiltrated my psyche, I always heard their begging. The running became a pathological necessity. Soon my best friends began visiting me on those abandoned streets, and we would laugh together.

The zombie nightmares died when I moved to college, but returned every time I slept in my childhood bedroom. Existential angst must have seeped into my pillowcases, it’s impossible to wash out. Lately, different flavors of apocalypse have been emerging from my salivary glands. It’s all I can taste. 

Apocalypse tastes like Elliptio crassidens– the elephant ear mussel.

My most recent apocalyptic vision visited me this morning. I was with my family in some subconscious construct of a living room. We all knew we were going to die. 

Dead elephants and granite boulders bobbed in the Pacific. The friction of the large masses altered the electric circuitry of the seas. Tsunamis were increasingly violent, and they would batter the shore line with thousand-pound fragments of Earth and bruised elephant corpses. 

Microplastic-lined 

mussel shell shards 

glinted among  

the salty death. 

I knew I was soon to drown. The tsunamis were pushing back the shoreline, overtaking the Santa Monica Pier. Soon, humanity would bob with the elephants. Circling across a planetary water-mass held together by Vanderwaal forces and carbon-dioxide-gravity. 

Would aliens look upon this mass grave and see a drop of water? 

In my final days I thought about ethics and evolution. I mourned my mammalian inability to breathe underwater. My family was trying so hard to be kind. Every action was weighted, because we only had so many. We apologized to each other. We did puzzles. We grinned widely and fell over bittersweet with our laughing. 

Our home became the last island, surrounded by unregulated waters. My father made me breakfast. My mother worked to encapsulate all of our DNA in something– something which could eventually become human life again. 

The human instinct

threads itself

through the thumping pulse 

empowering all awarenesses. 

Knowing the force of life will live on cushions your own extinction.

My mother pricked my finger and red lipstick blood bubbled out. She collected it inside of a button and blessed it upon the sea. One day it will turn into something that can breathe underwater. But until then, it’s uncollapsed human potential. 

The waters lilted along our ankles, and we all held hands.

That blooded button was like 70 years of human music drifting between the stars and singing in silence. Waiting to be discovered, listened to, and touched.