On Megiddo

I don't remember when I realized that I had begun to always keep the blinds down. I thought about it for a minute as I looked through them out the single window of my cramped studio. Sometimes I'll go hours without leaving my apartment's lone chair. I'll just stare at the blinds.

Tonight the small slits of 3 AM sky, my only hint of a world beyond the piles of dirty clothes and scattered paper, were bright orange.

"Huh," I said aloud. I always feel self-conscious when I start speaking to myself. Fuck, why is that? There's no one around to hear me talking to myself, yet I'm embarrassed about the fact that I'm talking when no one's around.

I wondered if maybe this was the Rapture. My coffee was cold. When it rains it pours.

Then again, I'm not really sure how the Rapture works. The extent of my Biblical education doesn't cover the apocalypse. The worthy are supposed to ascend into Heaven, I know that. I don't see any bodies blocking out the orange glow, though. Then again, we are in New York.

Maybe I have the whole thing wrong, I think to myself. That really is a stupid phrase. Who else are you going to think to?

The sea turns red with blood, but the sky? The sky reflects the oceans right? No, the oceans reflect the sky. I'm not the science type. Nor am I the religious type. When I am alone at night I like to think about things I am completely uneducated about. I like to draw my own conclusions based on faulty understandings of the most basic elements of the subject being examined. This all occurs in my head. Although I'm tempted to talk it out to myself, to lend it more meaning, I am terrified that the people who are not here when I am alone will see that I am wrong and judge me so. I don't think I could handle that kind of embarrassment.

Fuck it, I thought. I threw the collection of Bukowski poems, which had been sitting idly on my lap for the past half hour, to the floor. I sat up. The blinds hadn't been pulled up in over a month. I wouldn't dare force them out of their established cultural norm. I lifted one of the slats cautiously.

I sat back down. There were no horsemen, no seas of blood, no saintly ascending into heaven, no fire, no brimstone. The clock blinked 5:09. Maybe it was just the sun coming up. It was time to go to bed.