What could I possibly say that would matter?

An ocean of doubt falls full force on a city made of pain.
Uncertain waters creep through every crack and crevice.
Windows shatter from the pressure.
Everything that breathes, drowns.
There’s no light.
Only darkness.

I’ve looked into that darkness before.
And what I saw... I won’t speak of.
Fragments of myself too twisted to name.
Pieces I’ll never show.
Even I turn away from them.

You never really know someone.
No matter how much you think you do.
You don’t know what lives behind their eyes.
What they’ve done.
What they’ve thought about doing.

There’s no light at the end of this tunnel.
Only brush.
Only the ash of what used to be.

There was a light once.
But it wasn’t hope.
It was a fire.
A raging blaze that devoured everything.
Even the fragile frame of what we called society.

The Price of Clarity

I had a dream that shook me.

A friend of mine, let's just call him J, casually revealed he had written both Good Will Hunting and Con Air, like it was nothing. He'd won an Oscar and didn’t care. Meanwhile, I felt like I should give up on writing altogether. I could never measure up, and even if I did, maybe it wouldn’t mean anything anyway.

Why Good Will Hunting and Con Air? I don't know. But it felt symbolic, like he had mastered both art and spectacle and didn’t even value it.

Then I was on a bus to school or work, just part of the daily grind. Suddenly, ICE agents swarmed the bus. Out in the ocean was this huge mining rig, so big and powerful it looked like God coming over the horizon, spewing black smoke into the sky like it was poisoning the world.

An ICE agent threw me to the floor, and I lost my glasses. I couldn’t see. Then they took a liquid dropper out and placed some red liquid under my tongue. It tasted strange. No one else was treated like that. Just me.

What does it mean?