I am looking up at a very steep brown cliff, one that is kissing the clouds ever so slightly. Perhaps it is my skewed perception, just as we gaze upwards at skyscrapers, their tips tremendously smaller than their bases at which we are standing. I am in company of friends and there is loud chatter all around us, the sonorous voices of loud people surrounded by fellow louder people, each and all outdoing one another at being loud until my ears start to ring out the noise. I turn around and am surprised that we ourselves are standing on a cliff, a thunderous waterfall to my right and below, a vague outline of where it hits its stream. I am now in a meadow. I am living in a post-apocalyptic future of sorts and we have come to live more like our ancestors. We are a small community, we live in between a wide river and moon-grey cliffs, subjacent to the ominous, sky touching brown ones further back. We have unforgiving leaders and money is no longer a powerful or enriching entity. We have adopted a communist approach in which we all work for one another, support each member of the community and provide goods to our neighbours. There is a repetitiveness, a particular likeness to incarceration. I find myself outside the community, across the river, expected to forage berries and root vegetables. Instead, I stumble upon a young adult I recognise. I can’t place him, but I know him. I reach for his hand and he transforms into a file. I pick it up and read about him, who he is, where he is from but when I look away, I forget it all instantly, not realising that I had just attempted to read it. I unknowingly repeat this process over and over until I notice the setting sun. As I return to my community with no foraged food, I expect to be reprimanded. The building in which our leaders congregate is the most developed. It sits imposingly above our houses. I am wearily welcomed by our main leader, neither president, nor king, a brutal man who believes in community but not fair elections or people’s vote. I present to him the file and tell him that I will look after this man and adopt him into my family. I sense a strong rustle and am transported to another time. I can’t tell if I am shuffled slightly forward into the future, perhaps only a few days after my interaction with our leader or if I am reliving past experiences, prior to this community system. I am sitting at an unusually long table, in the leaders’ lavish room. It is dim and I can hardly make out people’s faces around me. I can tell from their voices that they are my friends. We talk and laugh endlessly until a girl’s face is lit up ever so slightly. I make out her features and know that I know her. Suddenly, I burst out that I remember kissing her once. She smiles faintly and yet her eyes turn vacant, as if she is crazed. We are now outside a council estate, terra cotta bricks, a dark evening barely lit by the flickering streetlights. We walk up the stairs to her flat and I feel overwhelmingly uneasy. She seems to think we are together. We sit on her bed and she no longer looks like the girl at the table. She has morphed into a different skin but it is undeniably the same person. She embodies disappointment and heartache, unfortunately placing her hopes for a better shot at relationships onto me. A storm causes her entire building to rattle and again, her eyes go vacant. She starts to walk away from me and I follow her, past her front door, down the stairs, to the pavement by which her car is parked. I try to dissuade her from driving in this weather but her vacancy turns into frantic despair. We start to drive and the noise becomes more and more unbearable, her frenzied shouting and the thundering wind, until again my ears start to ring out the cacophony. A large object flies through our windscreen, shattering it and us in turn. It’s 9am.