Lately, I’ve been having a recurring dream. It always involves water and the Big Blue Bus. More specifically, being submerged in water while riding the Big Blue Bus. During the latest version of the dream, the bus is heading down Ocean Avenue. In the dream, I don’t remember until it’s already too late that there was a reason I had told myself never to take this route again (that is to say Route 8, Ocean Park Boulevard). But the memory as to why doesn’t get triggered until it actually happens. Until the giant ocean waves from the Pacific start cascading over the barrier created by the wide strip of beach separating the road—located on a higher-up incline—from the ocean itself. But because of how large these waves are, there is no separating them from Ocean Avenue, where I’m seated toward the center of a crowded bus. Which in and of itself is apocalyptic as the buses in L.A. typically remain decidedly empty. Especially during random times of day, which is what this feels like in the dream.

I also happen to be sitting near someone I used to be good friends with, but haven’t talked to in years. We experienced the gradual fadeout that tends to happen when people move to different cities and start new lives. Even so, I never forgot about Chelsea. Perhaps that’s why she slipped into my subconscious that night. And also because she had moved to L.A., so it was only natural to place her there. Even though, from what I could tell, she wouldn’t be caught dead on any bus, whether run by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority or otherwise. But dreams weren’t about “realism,” so much as they were a representation of something larger—paired, in this case, with an inescapable sense of foreboding.

Chelsea bore that look of foreboding on her face as she told me that, despite the bus currently filling up with water, she wasn’t worried. She had seen it go higher before. “At least our heads are still above it,” she offered. But it wasn’t my head that I was worried about. It was my laptop. I had made the mistake of bringing it along in the backpack I was carrying and, at present, due to the ever-expanding depth of the water, I had lifted the backpack over my head so that my laptop might be spared.

Alas, its sparing was looking bleak as the waves kept crashing and crashing, seeping into the bus as it kept filling with water (though, at the very least, the water didn’t feel that cold). I suddenly got a flash of how the people on the Titanic must have felt. Or maybe that flash was only courtesy of James Cameron’s interpretation of how they must have felt. Either way, I was panicked. And I immediately told Chelsea, “Goddammit, this is exactly why I told myself I can never ride on this road again.”

Chelsea assured me that everything was going to be fine, continuing to remind me that she had seen worse conditions before while riding along Ocean Avenue. It did little to assuage me. The thought of losing my computer to a watery grave was more than I could bear. Was literally my worst nightmare realized. After all, my entire life (a.k.a. life’s work) was on this computer. If it were to be ruined, so, too, would I. Chelsea didn’t seem to understand that. Of course, it would be easy for her not to understand, considering that she wasn’t carrying any valuables on her person. In fact, she also told me that she had learned a long time ago not to bring anything irreplaceable on the Big Blue Bus if she was planning to ride it down Ocean Avenue. It was just too close to the water nowadays, she told me. Too big of a risk.

One supposes that everything was too big of a risk at present. Daring to walk out your door was a landmine, but so was staying behind it. Environmental tragedy and calamity could visit you wherever you were, it didn’t matter how “safe” or “well-prepared” you tried to be. In Los Angeles, if the flames weren’t licking your roof, then the water was, apparently, drowning you out. In real life, I didn’t even live in Los Angeles anymore. But it was a place that continued to mentally stalk (I won’t say “haunt,” because that has a negative connotation) me long after I had left. I guess it was stalking me in my dreams now, too. What with the calamity that had recently befallen it. And, unlike the fires that took place there in 2025, this rash of them was even more apocalyptic, decimating larger swathes of the city than ever before.

I guess my subconscious translated that destruction into water rather than fire—though, honestly, I don’t know which element is worse, if I had to choose. They both have their indelibly disastrous traits. Maybe it’s just a matter of what zodiac sign you are that determines which form of ravaging you “prefer.” I guess you probably think that’s very “L.A.” of me to say. But, unfortunately, “L.A.” doesn’t have such “hippie-dippy” associations anymore. All it has been associated with in the last twenty years is fear and environmental wrath. I can’t even visit it in my dreams anymore without experiencing that “aura” (another California word). That tainted aura.

As I’m thinking this in the dream, Chelsea informs me that I’m being overly dramatic as usual. That times change, and we, as humans, also have to along with them. But if this is the nature of change, I’d much rather go back to having dreamless nights. Ones where I’m not having an anxiety attack about losing my precious baby, my one true love: my computer. Chelsea, in real life, would probably tell me that was the biggest, most ominous sign of all with regard to how our society (and its priorities) had changed in the years since climate disaster became a daily part of our lives.

I’ll probably never see her in real life again though, not the way things are going. So I settle for being visited by her in this dream (a.k.a. nightmare), giving up on trying to hold my computer above water and instead dropping it so that I can hug her as the waves slowly but surely choke us out of existence. There is nothing left to do but let ourselves be swallowed by the Pacific on Ocean Avenue.