The New Everyday

My phone is running out of battery.

Yeah, Asma. That’s smart. Start off with something mundane and normal and so ridiculously every day, like it’ll divert from the new reality, the new every day. What’s next? Should I click my heels together thrice? I’m barefoot, so there is that.

Considering the crazy amount of its-the-end-of-the-world literature that I’ve consumed, there is nothing that comes into handy. It’s ridiculous of me to expect to learn life lessons or survival hacks from someone else’s gruesome imaginings.

Oh God. What am I doing?

I’m spiralling deeper and deeper into my own mania, my own hysteria, but writing is the only way that I grip onto some semblance of sanity, as hard as I’m gripping my phone right now. I need to remind myself this is real, despite the dream-like numbness that’s taken over me. I bet that’s just exhaustion. Mental, physical, emotional exhaustion.

And why should I not be exhausted? No movie emphasises exactly how hard it hits you, when you see your childhood friend scrabbling for your throat. They don’t prepare you for this. They don’t tell you that your throat turns raw from screaming ‘It’s me! It’s me! Why are you doing this?’ and yet it keeps growling and rasping and advancing and you keep scrambling back, trying to stay out of reach, trying to see through the glaze of pain and fear and tears.

Fuck. What is my life?

I don’t want to write it down. It’s so absurd. It seems so absurd. But they say I should. The sooner I come to accept it, the stronger my survival instinct gets. Or something of the sort. I can’t start fighting till I admit to myself who I’m fighting against. Do I even want to fight? Fight or flee? Is it even a choice? Survival ranks highest. But yes- corpses. I was running from corpses. I was fighting corpses. Dead people.

Lifeless bodies fuelled by something dark. I hate this. I hate that I have to use these dramatic sounding words to describe my reality.

This is the reality of my situation. I am sitting hunched over my phone, trying to record this, typing furiously, trying to block out the pain that’s searing through my right thigh. They pulled out a fingernail from my thigh. Sidra’s fingernail. Fuck, I need to stop crying.

I’m sitting in the corner. They think I’m still in shock. I don’t know. I wish I could ask for morphine or something something anything for the pain that’s wringing me inside and out. Oh yes, they. They are the people who helped me up, shot Sidra in the chest and took me and my shredded thigh along with them. We’re in the basement of South City Hospital. The first question I asked them was about the morgue. I think they’d given up on getting me to talk by then. But the morgue is empty. I don’t know if that was supposed to reassure me or scare the fuck out of me. They said the basement is the safest place for us. So, we’re all here. We are those who are injured, but not as severely as the ones who lie thrashing upstairs.

I don’t think they’ve eliminated us as threats yet. Nobody knows how this works. Am I infected? Do I have something dark tunnelling through my veins?

Are any of us safe? I don’t know if the ones standing with the guns are protecting us from the ones outside these doors or they’re protecting them from us. I don’t know how this works. I don’t know how this works.

I don’t know where anyone is. I was waiting for Sidra in the café when this all happened. I don’t know when it happened. I should stop calling it by her name. It’s not really her. But it is, isn’t it?

I don’t know I don’t know.

Would it be that bad if I started foaming at the mouth right now? If all rationality was wiped out by bloodlust? I wouldn’t be aware of this, of whatever is happening right now. I wouldn’t be able to hear the screaming from outside or smell the fear emanating from everyone’s pores here.

I’m scared.

I’m cold. I’m tired. I’m thirsty.