lucky-at-the-end-of-the-world

[lucky-at-the-end-of-the-world]

Entry 1: The End Times!

For as long as I can remember I've had the urge to run away. From home, from life — from myself. I spent my tween years with my eyes turned out of bus windows, unseeing as the little houses passed by, thinking about how it would feel to just get off at a random stop and go. Nowhere. Anywhere. 

I'd thought that maybe I'd have a better life by now and that I'd have outgrown this urge. But I don't and I haven't so at twenty-three I still do things like stare blankly at train cars when I’m taking the trash out at work and think about how easy it could be to hop them like some coming of age movie. I guess I'm a little old for coming of age, huh? 

Anyways I still get this feeling.

The need to leave everything behind and slip away into nothing. Not even a different life, just nowhere. To dissolve.

Of course I can't do that. I mean I definitely could but that plan involves a plane ticket, asking an old friend to take in my two cats and scrawling some waterproof apology to whatever poor park ranger would stumble across the body of a suicide victim with a collection of ironically optimistic tattoos. (There Is Still Time, and I Must Still Have Hope. Is there? Must I?)

Since I can't in good conscience do any of that, I do the next best thing. At nine or ten at night I pull on my boots and I walk to the gas station in the bad part of town. I buy a pack of Marlboro Reds even though I'm not a smoker, and I choke a couple down in the nearby park. They make me sick (again, not a smoker) and I walk home dizzy in the dark.

It's not much but it's something. When you're as anhedonic as I am, and when the line of ambivalence you walk is so thin that most days you have one foot on either side, you get pretty good at appreciating something. Even if that something makes you feel sick and is completely out of character.

The first time I did it felt like a relief.

I’m not a voyeur, I don’t think (autocorrect had to help me spell that word so I think that’s a point in my defense), but I’m a chronic wallflower and if I could afford therapy or diagnoses I’d probably be slapped with an anxiety disorder of some sort. Talking to people is hard and being seen by them is harder. In the cover of night I feel almost safe. Safe because I’m unseen and safe because I’m unnoticed. 

Safe because walking out in the open and smoking are both things that are completely out of character for me. It feels liberating in some small pathetic way. Like disappearing and killing myself slowly over the course of weeks one cancer stick at a time. Since I started this habit I can’t stop the idea that I’m just methodically hammering one more nail in my coffin until the day I’ve realized that it’s sealed and there’s no walking back home— Reader, do you know what I mean? Probably. It’s not all that profound. And hey, today’s news has made it even more meaningless. Awesome!

Ever since I was a little girl I’ve known I wanted to be a depressed cliché waxing poetic about common emotions like they’re made somehow more special because I’m the one feeling them. 

Back to today’s news, though. I think it’s pretty cool. The end of the world. Sorry T.S Eliot, it’s neither bang nor whimper but a slowly arriving and unstoppable asteroid. I always knew we were no better than dinosaurs and now the universe proves me right! The universe also is taking away my choice as I have so often asked her to do over burning incense and T.J.Maxx tarot decks. 

I guess if this is the first time you’re hearing about it (which would be weird, how did you even find my blog) we’ve been given about two years before the day of impact. Give or take. Hopefully take. Sorry if you’re someone who likes being alive and is enjoying your time here on earth, but the rest of us are collectively relaxing and handing the narrative over to whatever comes next.

For me that’s being out here at ten and smoking again. The park is always empty and tonight’s no different. I’ve even dragged the shitty little wooden picnic table out from under the metal awning so I can stargaze. Who’s gonna stop me? It’s the end times, people are doing much worse than moving picnic tables. Then again in this part of town they were doing that anyway.

Not that you’d be able to tell since this is a blog, but I just spent the last twenty minutes staring at the stars and almost forgot I was writing this. This tiny pass-through town is heavy with light pollution so the stars aren’t exactly glamorous, but they’re basically just as pretty as anywhere. Especially tonight.

Tonight they’re a shimmering curtain taking two whole years to open for a very very special end of the world show— just for Earth. 

Sorry again to anyone who’s bummed about the whole dying soon thing but I’m pretty…relieved. No more stress, no more worries. I’ve blinked away two years before without even noticing, this should be a cake walk. I’m still a little scattered on how to spend them. The only plans I’ve ever made in my life are how to end it, so I guess I’m thrown. I have a couple of ideas, though. I mean…I have always wanted to die in a National Park. 

I wonder if two years is enough to see them all. At least a few, right? Enough to pick out a favorite? 

If anyone actually does read this, good luck out there.

— Dan