Nostalgia for Armageddon

Willowy days.
I breathe in and taste a small bridge - almost a miniature bridge - over a railway line that runs across a road I once walked every day. In this imagined breath - this imagined memory - there are also rushes - like reeds shifting on a pond.
It tastes like spring in old towns.

A fragment of something, a fever, an unread book, an unheard song:
These summery thoughts are full of boredom and armageddon.
These words are apoken - or rather, whispered, by a woman sleeping - or on the verges of sleep. She flickers over books she had read, tracing charts, chasing stars, the unfortunate constellations combining, knowing, deliciously, that this sleep of hers heralds the end days.
I have no idea who she is.
A fragment, like I said.

I remember 1999, those months coming out of winter and heading into summer. Caught up in Kosovo, in war in Europe, the bombing of Yugoslavia. Long talks into the night with house-mates about Nostradamus and apocalypse, fractured sleep and days cracked by the anxiety of leaving the dissertation till too late. Worried about the future, if there would be a future, and thinking when NATO and Russian tanks were facing each other at Pristina Airport -the worst flashpoint between east and west since the cold war- that Nostradamus had been right after all.

Willowy days, like I said.
Makes me nostalgic for armageddon.