Weekly Writing – April 20 2024

Building a city on a sleeping god means being ready, always, for the end.
But that’s not remarkable, really. If this god ever peels its body up from under the crust of centuries, it’ll be the end for everyone. The only difference will be that we end a little faster.
Building a city on top of something alive means being reminded constantly that you are small. Some people live their entire lives on its back, like a child on the shoulders of an unspeakable father. They never set foot on dead earth over bedrock, never know how real ground feels or sleep without dreams.
Our god sleeps deeply enough that it hardly ever dreams. Which is lucky for us – when it does, entire districts can end up going mad with the beauty or terror of it, dreams as thick as smog in the air. But even when it sleeps peacefully, we tiny, sensitive insects, we human beings, feel it constantly underfoot. And when we lay our heads down for the night, there’s nothing to stop our uneasy subconscious minds from describing to us everything they feel.
I’ve seen it in my own dreams – it created this fertile valley between walls of mountains when it fell down to rest. Maybe it had travelled far, maybe it was injured, or maybe, for it, this is like lying down for a few minutes on a sunny riverbank before continuing on an afternoon stroll. It pulverized the mountains beneath it into a cozy pallet, and of course we came to explore and build in the new straight path it had created to the sea.
Maybe it came from the sea. Maybe it’ll go back there someday. Or maybe it’s taking a few cosmic minutes to snooze before strolling on over the rest of our trembling world, and it’ll rise tomorrow with our city clinging like a few stray, screaming barnacles to its back.