You wake up and the sky is gone. At times that’s how it seems. You wonder at it: how could there not be a sky? What will become of us now, in this world without a sky? Was it ever there, or did we just imagine it there, as an exercise of collective will?

And then you talk to others who insist the sky is there. They say: It’s not gone, it’s just red now. Accept that we did want it red. Move on with your life and suck it up, buttercup. Red sky will make us great again.

But the sky isn’t red. It’s not anything. It’s just … not. It is a not-ness. An un-sky. A nothing.

And then you start talking to people who laugh, not without compassion, that you ever fell for the idea there was a sky. They say: That big vast emptiness?

Oh, yes. That’s always been there for us. Is it there for you now? How… interesting.

We can tell you a thing or two about that emptiness, if you’d listen.

We’ve been watching it an awful long time.

The sky is the future. Or it was the future. That’s how it seems, at times. How odd, to speak of the future in the past tense. But the past tense presents us with further troubles.

It seems the past is gone, too.

Great again? When we we great? For whom?