A Brief Reprieve During the Apocalypse

“I’m scared, Juliet.”

“Oh darling. I’m scared, too.”

“We’re alone. Completely alone. Completely, irrevocably, utterly alone. Everyone else is dead. And it’s only us. And, in a few hours, we’ll be gone too. Everything will be gone with us. And that is tragic. But also sexy. Let’s make out!”

“You’re not taking this seriously.”

“I know, I know! I’m sorry. It’s just… this is really dark, ya know?”

“It is! But that’s what I like about it. There’s no anxiety, there’s no banal, there’s nothing except the moment and the acute knowledge that the moment will end. It feels real.”

“I don’t know. Why can’t you be into feet or school girl fantasies or something? I can be a stern taskmistress, teaching a particularly penetrating lesson. I know how much you love experiential learning.”

“As fun as that sounds, it’s just not the same. It’s not real.”

“I could make it feel pretty real!”

“You know what I mean.”

“It’s just… Sure, we’re all going to die someday, everything ends, etc etc. I won’t deny that it’ll happen, but I don’t really want to think about it either.”

“I don’t really want to think about it, necessarily. But I feel it a lot. I- I find myself wanting forever. Like, every relationship I’ve been in, my head can say ‘this, too, will end’ but my heart wants forever so badly it dives in, latches on, and won’t let go. The apocalypses help with that.”

“Well, I’m glad they’re good for something.”

“No, seriously. I am so terrified of endings. Of losing something that will never return. And the apocalypse fantasies help me sit with that fear. But they let me sit with it with someone I deeply care about, so there’s fear but there’s also love and life and now. And since I know forever’s impossible, that’s the next best thing.”

“I mean, I get that. I think. I guess it feels… inauthentic. Like, we have this intense, long night sitting with the ‘knowledge’ that tomorrow, for us, will never come… but then it does. And we’ll say tearful, heartfelt farewells, mime agonizing deaths in a fiery inferno, and then, I don’t know, do brunch.”

“We could do brunch. And while we sit, I can softly gaze across the table into your shining eyes wanting nothing more in that moment than to be with you, and I can be thankful that it was just a fantasy and that I am fortunate enough to have another day with you. And I never want to take that for granted.”

“That’s so sweet. And almost convincing. I still think it’s all kind of ridiculous.”

“Could you try it anyway?”

“Yeah. For you, I can try it anyway. But you’re buying brunch.”

The Last Girl

Without a doubt, my favorite genre is the post-apocalyptic. I include dystopia in that, because dystopia encompasses the same kind of widespread destruction of humanity in a spiritual form, even if the people will likely survive into the future (and may move to a non-dystopic phase within their ontology).

In the abstract, it's romantic. Youth, desperation, terror, and unquenchable need all lend themselves to the "fucking like they do in art films" mentality (and support the "hot/crazy" positive correlation). The apocalypse lends itself to those emotions directly.

In the immediate, it's, of course, not romantic at all. I've had conversations and long periods of time with someone I desperately loved when I had reasonable expectations of her not surviving or not making it to safety and those months (crystallized in a few particularly intense weeks) are some I never, ever want to relive.

But what that experience and genre do convey is an immense sense of meaning. It's survival. Except, in most of the better media involving the apocalypse, it's rarely the survival of the individual but the survival of the community. It's love, it's family, it's human as a quintessential social animal and the struggle to not let that spirit of humanity die lends a sense of importance to every moment that is largely absent from modern, middle-class, Western lives like my own.

In the apocalypse, there is literally a struggle between Being and Nothingness. Whereas we are interchangeable and expendable (outside of our communities) in modern life, in the end of the world we *are* life.

Or that's how it often seems, anyway.

In truth, there is so much "quiet desperation" even in this world of comforts. One need only go to a "Take Back the Night" rally and listen, for an hour, to every single person who comes up and says "I've never told anyone this before, but..." and you find that spiritual survival is very much an ongoing and contemporary struggle. And, indeed, those struggles are what make me feel real and vital.

The lives of others, as it were. In an apocalypse, I would survive for someone I loved. But I wouldn't survive for myself. And the same's true now. I find meaning in the meaningful struggles of others. I'm only safe when I'm ensconced in another, only happy and joyous when another is embracing the all of me. It's all other other other.

It's the same way in apocalypse too. I write this same post again and again and again. Because it's the fundamental tension in my life. I have no (or minimal) worth in and of myself. And I'm not entirely sure if that's a bad thing. After all, I rather doubt most people would want to be the last person on earth. But one of the last of a select two? That would make all the difference. Why not in life as well?