I want to be ruined by the thing I already knew in the new desiring.
—Alina Ștefănescu

How many times have I pursued Love across this membrane of Death?

Flight En-Zed-Three departs El-Ay-Ex at Eight-Oh-Five chock-full of blood sacrifice: a Boeing 777 containing 377 human bodies.

Our departure port, the Bradley Terminal in Los Angeles, opened in 1984, thirty years after George Orwell’s 1984 was published and ten years to the day after I was predicted to be born—but wasn’t.

As the nose cone kisses the International Date Line, our plane snags in the astral jelly of the space-time continuum; for the duration of a blink, we blip off radar.

We have flown inside-out of Time itself, Time being key to prophesies.

We are Schrödinger’s cats in unopened boxes. Anything is possible here and nothing has happened. The time is out of joint, Hamlet says.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past,” Orwell wrote in 1984, a book people are rereading, along with Parable of the Sower and The Handmaid’s Tale, as if dystopian novels of the past are pattern books for surviving the present—or the future.

Prophecies are problematic, though. The karma of their internecine plots isn’t fully kenned except in arrears when it’s too late, when its tendrils have already set other storylines into motion.

That’s the problem with our species: we survive via pattern recognition, but we overlook the fact that patterns can exist while signifying nothing and omnipresent dangers fester in plain sight.

The danger of literary works (themselves patterns of symbol, repetition, karma, and Time) is that their reflective allegories are given the weight of visionary revelations.

“I’m not a prophet,” Margaret Atwood said. “Prophecies are really about now. There is no future. There are many possibilities, but we do not know which one we are going to have.”

Some mistakenly consider Atwood’s novels prophetic rather than observant of clear and present dangers rooted in the past and delivered on a future date.

We are living in degenerate times, Buddhists say—degenerate, not aberrant, despite the feeling that we’ve stumbled onto an errant branch of the Timeline—as if there is (or was) one “right” chronology, a unidirectional order tending toward justice that we’ve somehow screwed up.

It’s hardly a new story: we stand by flaccidly, slack-jawed in disbelief, as Rome’s temples crumble around us again and again.

What we’re witnessing, what there is no survival guide for, although it’s not unprecedented, is one cycle’s end at the birth of another, and let’s face it, apocalypse—not destruction but revelation—is unsettling.

Thus, we cancel Cassandra, clap back at Tiresius, and seek more palatable prognostications in the stars and the tarot, the livers and the spleens.

The fact is, Time’s arcs don’t bend toward justice but ambivalence.

Time is a self-digesting ouroboros—or a tapeworm: sever the head and its tail wriggles off, implants, and regrows, two-for-one.

Irony masquerades as prophecy too.

Under the false flag of averting human extinction (read: fear of mortality), the tech broligarchs’ greedy self-grasping may hasten the planetary demise of all species—including them—by their own resource-devouring inventions powered by fear, suppression, and control.

Welcome to life in the Necropastoral, a political-aesthetic exchange zone presciently detailed by poet Joyelle McSweeney in The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, published in 2014.

(That’s thirty years after 1984 and sixty after 1984, for those counting.)

A nonrational zone, the Necropastoral “does not subscribe to Cartesian coordinates,” McSweeney writes, “or Enlightenment notions of rationality and linearity, cause and effect.”

The Necropastoral is anachronistic and often looks backward to look forward, as writers similarly do.

Here, in the conjoined hours of Friday–Sunday, in this dial-spinning dead zone 37,000 feet above Earth’s crust, amidst the dusty reek of ozone-and-latrine-cake, having swallowed a credit card’s worth of microplastics from the roast beef microwaved in the bowels of this carbon-burning bird that bears us in her red felted belly, my fellow passengers and I, swaddled in synthetic wool blankets, curl, fetus-like, in thanatosis, drunk on a high-oxygen mix of oneiric fantasies: our beloveds, dead and alive, awaiting us on the other side.

It dawns on me, my forehead slick with sebaceous grease, that we aren’t living in the Necropastoral, we are the Necropastoral, and we have been all along.

We aren’t mere witnesses to the End Times, we are the living ends that midwife the next extinctions; we’re fulfilling karma rather than breaking it.

When viewed from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch below, our surrendered Saturdays appear as sky omens, a poufy con trail shitted from the plane’s cloaca.

The Langoliers—ravenous chronophages—give chase, gorging on the hours we’ve sacrificed in exchange for warping through Time.

McSweeney once reminded me that posthumicity is collective, the grave is a fertile place, for the writer’s duty is to remind us that we will die and that we aren’t dead presently.

“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,” Orwell wrote, but I prefer Barry Lopez: “Real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.”

Lopez’s version feels closer to the truth, for what place exists without darkness?

If there is a genuinely final end of Time, I suspect it’s a void of blinding light, an obliterating whiteness, a screaming blankness, the same way gold is garish at noon and empyrean at midnight.

That’s why I’m curled up in the belly of this bird: not to hide from shadows but to seek more than dissolution or despair inside the infinite abyss.

“Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty,” Jun’ichirō Tanizaki wrote.

Many of my beloveds already dwell there in shadow, save the one I’m flying to.

The hardened will call it treacle, but the sweet-bitter of loving this one term-limited being despite his inevitable end pricks my heart to the core, even as I want to throttle him for discarding orange peels and empty recyclables on the counter and the week’s dirty laundry in a grave next to the bed.

We don’t know when we’re doing something for the last time, he notes regularly since his heart surgery.

How you spend your minutes is how you spend your life, and what you love becomes your fate, so what isn’t worth the risk of loving if what’s at stake is nothing less than living?

A woman cracks open her window shade too early, blasting the fuselage with orange radiation.

A chorus of zombie groans and silhouetted hands raise in protest.

It’s not yet daybreak in our future meeting place where the shadows are long enough to resemble night, where abandoned Hope puddles tamely at the bottom of a box.

There’s no telling what world our plane will land in because we haven’t imagined it yet.

Even if we could… immortality as a sundrenched tarmac or an open (empty) road—it’s laughably bleak, isn’t it? Why would anyone want to live forever?

How a person greets Death reveals what she loves and what she believes is worth loving.

How a person greets Death tells us how she bears to love anything in a world where everything dies.

Whether we see it or not, the past clings to us at every second. It is omnipresent, should we choose to look. Can you hear it? Feel it tugging at your garments, whispering, Open your eyes?

The future is not ahead or separate from today, as we tell ourselves, but huddled close, spooning us in the dark, nuzzling our necks with its humid breath, stroking the memories that have become part of us with Time, the seeds of whatever’s to come.

Time resets to 00:00:00.

We have only to roll over to embrace what’s already/always (t)here.

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Gabriela Denise Frank is a transdisciplinary artist, editor, educator, and winner of the Fern Academy Prize. Her work has appeared in BOMB Magazine, Poet Lore, EcoTheo Review, Chicago Review, Epoch, DIAGRAM, Northwest Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. The author of “How to Not Become the Breaking” (Gateway Literary Press 2025), she serves as creative nonfiction editor of Crab Creek Review.