Waves and radiation.
Maybe they were right, the extremists. Maybe the world did end last night. Maybe it happened quietly and privately and we’ll all suffer our own personal deaths slowly but surely. A mass, sweeping earthquake is too bold a prediction. Too literal. But a quiet airborne toxic event is just what we need. Just what it would be. There are a million ways to kill yourself with no one knowing. Paranoia, fear, shame, secrecy, longing, isolation. We could all be doing it at the same time and no one would know. White Noise has seeped into my subconscious over the years, it haunts me because it’s so real, so possible. The end of the world will be individualized and barely make a sound. This all came to me when I found the blood this morning. It could be cancer, it could be nothing. Either way my fear and isolation will rot away at the happy parts of me that were left. Just as predicted. Five months of agony. I think the locusts started coming for me when my wallet was stolen. My happy, safe cloud punctured. Then I graduated, an era over, now floating in the ectoplasm somewhere I’m not quite sure. Then my friends left in uncomfortable ways. Then Anthony needling his way back into my life. Then Eric, beautiful crazy Iraq vet Eric. Shook me to my core to see from this side what has happened to these men and women. My supervisor never said goodbye, never responded to my emails, it’s as though I never existed. Roommate still pretends she does not owe me the money. I was never really there to begin with. Suddenly all those nights I woke up sweating feeling the earth pulled out from under me make total and complete sense. For a while I woke up at least twice a week feeling lost and frightened, not sure where I was, feeling like a child lost in the woods, parents eaten by zombies. Awful, aching loneliness, and more than that, like all my gains – my brain, my family, my friends, my purpose – the earth opened up in front of me and swallowed them all leaving me standing there. Night after night. Now it makes so much sense. I’m invisible. People always leave. The last profile Arya had before he died- "everyone I know goes away in the end." It makes sense. it speaks to me now on a soul level,Johnny and Arya and I, we all see the same thing now. When I thought about this five months of agony prophesied by these wack jobs in the subway, I thought, fuck that, I’d kill myself rather than suffer. As I face a new potential demise, I realize why my thoughts were naive. Of course we’ll suffer, because the ending wont be an obvious one. It will be filled with fear and dread and enough moments of potential that we stick around to see what happens. If they had preached that from the subway floor, I may have listened. I may have pretended to believe in this god I used to speak to. I may have professed my sins and sang to the heavens and felt that thick, sticky slime of fake shame all over me. So I’m dramatic, I’m crazy, I’m just wrong, it doesn’t really matter anymore. Even if it’s just a gash, a rash, a purple bump, for a brief moment I understand the insanity, I’m a part of it. The depth and the level of it are a part of me.
I was kind of disappointed the world didn’t end. {Not that I was expecting it to, really.} It meant I actually I had to do something with my life. Sigh.
Warning Comment
Maybe the rapture happened and just no one was worthy of being swept up into the cloud? This was a very interesting read.
Warning Comment