World’s End

It’s nice out today.

Funny how a simple lie can make the truth look that much more clear. The sentence had been innocent. Conversational. A casual attempt at small talk, candid and awkward-looking in its stubby little chat bubble, dwarfed beneath a series of back and forth paragraph texts from the night before. It was the sharp trill of this message that woke me up that morning. I knew something was off right then, because usually I was woken by the trill of birds.

There aren’t any birds anymore. There is no sun. It’s truly the end of the world, and it’s exactly how every sci-fi film and dystopian novel has ever described it to be. The trees have lost their posture. The flowers are like pencil shavings, scattered in the smoke-coloured grass. The clouds look like they were birthed from fire. Life is nowhere to be seen.

The doctors told us five years. Five years. But as the hysteria kicked in and my vision blurred and David Bowie played faintly in my ears, I knew⁠—I just knew, somehow⁠—that this wasn’t quite right. Their estimate, no doubt backed by medical research and statistics, was wrong this time. They just didn’t know it yet. But I did. I knew. I couldn’t fool myself into believing that I’d get to keep you for another half a decade. Another eighteen hundred days. Because the truth is, you only had seven. Seven days.

In those seven days, I watched the world end.

Your voice shrank. Hoarsened, like a broken flute. A dying bird. I watched the colour drain from your face—the sun. I watched the flower petals that were once your eyelids become hollow and heavy, and your limbs curl inward like those of a withering tree. I watched as, with every breath you took, you didn’t choke on ash or smoke or dust; you choked on air. Clean air. Life. Life was killing you as though it were toxic, poisoning you with every moment that passed, and the injustice of it all is so frustrating I want to scream. I want to throw something. I want someone to blame. I can’t blame the doctors, who did their best with the time you had left even when they, too, realised it was less than they’d predicted. I can’t blame myself, which has always been a dependable choice in the past. And I can’t blame you, who had texted me that feeble sliver of optimism with unsteady fingers that morning, and then never sent another—no matter how much I blew up your phone in the minutes that followed. That day, through the static panic that rang in my ears and the lyrics of the song that circled through my skull, I could hear the birds call to one another outside my car window. I was blinded by the sunlight that reflected in the glass hospital doors. I staggered through lush summer greenery, a rainbow of wildflowers, a gentle breeze, and I watched the world end right there in front of me. Right there in that room.

Life will never be the same. Humanity has suffered a grievous tragedy and it doesn’t even know it. The people of this world will never realise how much they’ve lost, because they never got the privilege of meeting you.

It was not nice out that day.

It hasn’t been nice a day since.