I live in possession of the feeling that a great, soft rain is just beyond my reach. Growing up within the rainy seasons of Miami has provided me lifetimes of dreams I can’t recall, except for the sense I was comfortably drowning from one flood or another. As for my memories, they have fallen underwater, or have just now sunk with grace. Great bluish green and gray hues, the white noise of rain patter, like the motion of flipturning in the pool. Humidity suits me well. I let my possession of the past collapse into the ever-present rain. It’s easier to leave behind a lifetime that’s already sunk beneath your reach. My subconscious lives out this conflict, the desire to leave behind great pains to the apocalypse, and to live in melancholy for the world we could not achieve.

At the age of thirteen I chose a Hebrew name, Isaac. I chose it because it’s a verb that means “to laugh.” I liked the idea that my name was both a command and a plea. I saw my future self as a source of warmth during Miami’s humid winters, which breathe into your marrow. To choose a name is just as powerful as choosing what not to name. I felt the weight of many words, concepts shared with others and yet all my own, and begat my world with declaration and omission in equal measure. And as I learned to read, much later on, I found myself in the words of Jeremiah and his lamentations. I liked how Shakespeare fashions the prophet of Jerusalem’s fall, some schmuck wracked with stomach pains, designated by a god who knew he’d fail. And yet Jeremiah named the fate of his city, growing weaker with each successive warning, hurtling himself towards a role too large and too late for any single person. It was as if he was tasked with moving the whole people of his world with his two hands. I like his form of faith best; there’s a value to failure and the desire to live past it. In my dreams, the name I’m called by a soundless pair of lips rests somewhere between Isaac and Jeremiah. I like my name, but I don’t think it’s particularly fitting for a writer. Within those dreams I can’t recall beyond their fragmentary grains, I feel the weight of my name in my palm, along with all the others I choose to fulfill their function.

I think the desire for an apocalypse is like nostalgia, selfish. Maybe it’s more the fact I savor melancholy, that I resist the desire to live unconflicted in memories. Or maybe it’s my photographic memory, with details I can now gleam and discern as fractures in the Miami bedrock. What I remember as an unfinished building in brutalist fashion, I now wield as an ongoing legal battle between omnivorous developers and a few realized graves, gathered just past a few mangroves. I would rather that cities built upon graves be submerged beneath calcifying waves, than watch billowing smoke rise from the world. At the periphery of all our memories exist such fractures, and we can only live uncomplicatedly in dreamtime at the cost of any other memory than our own. Miami has performed nostalgia well, letting memories belonging to the many elsewheres of its immigrants grow, constrict, and ossify, until the graves below might as well be one or two skulls between some struggling roots. Everyone loses some part of themselves when they move from the past, and their nostalgia absolves them of guilt. But I’m neither so self-assured nor complicit. I am wracked with pain for graves I couldn’t grasp, silt-stained bones and effigies left in a language not even my dreams could divine. Should you reach for any gravestone among our shores, you would realize the storms have washed away all names and dates. You would do no better reaching for a book in a library, and turning its many blank pages in exasperation. We turn and turn and turn again, but what could be greater for the soul than the tender reverberations of all families sleeping soundly? In my illiteracy, I have lost more than the preservation of all graves. I have lost myself.

But still we try, me and every person too wise for their own nostalgia. Or maybe I am too foolish to resist anxiety, the lulling comfort of memories even as our world fades back into fire. That realization of myself and every person I have found to exist in every partition of the world, fellow schmucks who readily laugh in the face of our fate. My friends know my name before they knew me. The community I call home is not the many in Miami who live in polluting disregard for the rising waves. People from home too readily argue the fine details, an effort to make every memory an island. I want to know and be known by the islands already underwater. With cynicism I can regard this desire as the anxiety of my race – the class and color of my attitude – but I try not to fall into doomsaying. Leave that to the bohemians, who are so nostalgic they sincerely believe themselves awake. I speak with confidence about these things. What are the languages, the memories and pleas of this world, and what is required of us to understand the memories of another? After suffering whiplash at seriously considering the defenses of all nostalgic parties, I chose solitude. The novelty of masking one’s humors wore off with time, teaching, and quite a bit of reading into the dreamtimes of other sinking cities. Most recently I found community within the dreamtime of another misshapen and misplaced, politically anxious Jew almost a century my senior. I don’t believe my history brings me any closer to one artist or another, but I do find joy in coincidences. I saw the apocalypse of Stalingrad through the eyes of a man past the end of time.

I read Life and Fate on a tropical coast and constantly felt the chill of its dull fire. I read this book, a historical epic about characters choosing a life of shared humanity– censorship knowing that its author would die disrecognized. I couldn’t help but feel his face fading with each successive, hopeful declaration. Imagine that, a book like a void, about souls who dreamt of a world untethered to the ignition of catastrophe, written by a soul who had lost everything because he gave in to that dreamtime. People may produce nice art, but great art is known before you can understand it, and will be drawn from you whether or not you ask to receive it. And so the author witnessed the world on fire and dreamt, and fell into it further. Imagine losing your family, your friends, your own work, and then losing the ability to nostalgia the pain away. For his faith, he was consumed by the fire of indifference, before the great storm surge of time reclaimed his edifice. The pitter patter of spring rain uncovers many bright bones among the silt. Even the bones continue to dream, they speak in the reverberation of droplets in the hollow spaces of time. As if he could have avoided that fate, either by negligence of the dream or censorship of others like you. We become those dreams that consume our waking days. Everyone will soon feel a pair of boots wipe the mud off their heels upon the lips of their own tombstones. One must bear anxiety with the dignity of those long dead.

You, too, will feel the heel upon your throat, in the blurring before you fade into that silent sleep. In paradise, I dreamt of Auschwitz. It felt ever-present, and even if I knew in my dream that to be a literal lie, I fell into it until I understood myself. I woke up on the damp sand of high tide and felt words I could not name. The impression of narrative, a psychology given language, wound me further towards an understanding. I paced myself along the dredge and into the waters until I could articulate. Sometimes a truth is so simple that it takes years to be recognized. And for all that I cannot yet say, I recognize what lay in the depths of dreamtime, mine and ours. Sleep comes with effort. My arguments riptide me further away from the shore, where I see myself on a pale rock between constellations. Not that I can read those either, but I see my own hands reach towards a comet fading into light above the swaying palm fronds.

And what of that comet? I watch myself reach for it, and I reach towards the shape of myself riding its velocity. That’s where I found you. We are bound towards purgatory, a mass held together by impulses. First, I recognize your face within that throttling drive, and rise above it to etch the word for your first breath. What can I do with this face, this face that allows me to see and speak? Calving winds shear the ridges of my face as I search the mass of humanity for you. Each careful moment costs me another lifetime I could have spent in nostalgia, a fate deserving none. I look down upon that mass, and with the sculpting care of hands, find and hold the faces of others within the fear. The labor to see one face is taken alone. And with joy, I feel your hands climb toward me, correct me, guide me towards a fashion of souls we may both recognize. With time, more time than any other us are allotted within the brief lull between our birth and death, we may recognize each other in that dreamtime. And with more time than is left in this world, we may all rise from that mass together. Tethered but not bound, we may spirit into the nearest star, and shine as bright as the white of our eyes. And no matter the effort to turn your face from mine, I will see you further, even as we fall into it.

I return to the shore where all these dreams remain possible. I feel myself restored by each wave crest as I find us traveling further down the shore. I may be weary and deprived, but I know this to be the best life I could fashion. There was never consideration for nostalgia, I knew the threat of it before I was old enough to think it needed me. And I never needed it, because I had next to me the warm callous of another face, holding me in patient reprise. That face smiled widest as it told me of the rotting core, the exorcism, the purgatory and dream. Imagine that, to reassemble the past, nourish it into a dream of your beloved, and then consider all the ways we cannot save ourselves. And after all that, where peace between us might be assured, so the voice goes that there could certainly be no clamor for a kiss. Years of my young life processed through these words. How wonderful it is to be so young and illiterate, and to immediately know that words have power? And what do we call the devil, but a child scorned without a face of her own? That is the grief we keep together. The genius of Beloved is that perpetual dreamtime, of its characters, its readers, and the book itself. How the book knows how it’s held, how it holds you in turn, the fear you may hold of a face not unlike yours, and still you consider falling into it.

I knew those words had power because I taught them at the end of the world just a few years ago. I lived within the sound of sirens, but so did my students. Somehow still, the sirens faded as we fell into it together, reading her words, the bleeding heart that’s yours and mine. There is effort to teach, but there is beauty too. Those words saved some, who I watched through a screen discover their first ambivalence. What else can you call a pain you’ve always had, but never known? We sank into the quiet drift of plague years, knowing spring lay somewhere just a little past our reach. And if she could reach, then we together could fashion many more faces. The years passed in just weeks, and I recall the time as the tightening of the windowsill just before a blizzard, the waxing of light as blossoms rise by. Time passes and the flames fade, but we draw nearer to the sun.

Dreamtime is the complexion of what will not be what it can not. Had I any more time than the painful, wonderful, complete years before me, I would know better the reason I am called. I laugh upon my effigy, a cohesion of names, and remark upon the gravestones. Bound upon the latticework of newer empires, I watch each faded name restore in sunlight. If not the name, then the chance to be remembered, to press your palm upon the masterwork and weep. And what of all those with no graves of their own? In time, their ash and bone meal will preserve, a solid mass to unfurl beneath an expanse of blossoming hues. The edge of time will be devoted to their discovery, and with my own hands, I will fashion your face, and your face, and your face too. And when we recognize each other in the fading light of our sun’s final hours, even the flames that consumed you can be forgotten.

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Zachary Issenberg is a writer from Miami. He earned his MFA from Columbia University, where he wrote a lot of fiction about Miami. He currently lives with his wife and their obese cat, while he continues to write more fictions about Miami. You can find his writing in TheMillions, Bookforum, LARB, 3AM, Propagule, The Shoutflower, and MinorLits. You can check out his work at https://zacharyissenberg.squarespace.com/