apocalypse now?

I was six years old when my world first ended. I had just fallen in love with the opposite sex, Tanner was his name. He had light eyes and freckles similar to me. I don’t recall anything all too remarkable about him, just that one day I noticed he should be my boyfriend. I didn’t waste time daydreaming like some toddler, I took immediate action on these new feelings by incessantly begging him to be my boyfriend during nap time. Pure, primal six year old attraction knows no rhyme, no reason. Please, please, please, please, please I chanted, like some fevered child possessed by Morrisey. He eventually agreed with a smug “Fiiinnne.” I rolled over on the floor and smiled up at the ceiling. The world opened up before me, my heart swelled the size of an eighth grader, at least. All you have to do is beg and you shall receive, I learned. I floated around the room for the rest of the day until, to my dismay, he had a change of heart and called it off.

What did I do wrong? I wondered. Did I eat my snack weird? Was it the stuffed animal I brought in? I was heartbroken. My first attempt at love proved futile. Would all of life be this way?—constant pleading for things only to be disappointed by them? Yes.

Once home I let my parents know I was in no mood to be coddled. Alone in my room I fidgeted and paced under my heartache, unsure what to do with it. I rearranged my beloved collection of toy horses in an effort that my hurt feelings might follow suit. Those horsies were my wisest counsel at the time. They were living in a doll crib, it was the best make shift stable I could offer them, but not even they could console me. How would I face school tomorrow knowing the one I loved didn’t want me? Tell me Hillary Horse Head, tell me how! What cruel world brings us into contact with our deepest desires only to have those desires possess their own autonomy? The liminal space of heartache seemed endless. But I must’ve finally given way to sleep and continued on with kindergarten because I have a high school diploma… somewhere.

Some years later, the end reared it’s head again. “We’re moving.” my parents told me. Who knew the world could end with so few words? It’s a statement I’d hear again and again over the coming years. By the time I reached seventh grade I’d have three major moves under my belt. Each notch a reminder that achieving some sense of stability doesn’t mean it can’t be ripped out from beneath you without your say or consent. Being an only child furthered a quality of loneliness to the shuffling of my tiny life. Sometimes I imagined I had bunk beds and a wise, older brother who slept up top. He was popular and protective of me, but not too protective—healthy protective. He’d listen to all my worries about the move. I miss you, bro.

I got used to feeling like the strange new kid, awkward and quiet at first. But like with any skill, making new friends became easier with time and exploration. I could make people laugh, I learned this brought them a sense of ease and a sense of power for me. There were times I even deeply enjoyed being a mysterious new kid. I remember my dad dropping me at school in his shitty, dusty blue civic with Harvey Danger blasting, ♫ I’M NOT SICK BUT I’M NOT WELL, AND I’M SO HOT BECAUSE I’M IN HELL ♫ I stepped out of the car dressed like one of the girls from the Craft, and yeah I was 8. When you’re an only child who moves around a lot, you’re allowed to listen to alt rock music, watch rated R movies, and practice witch craft while home alone.

Before puberty, it felt satisfying to be different. One time I dressed up for St. Patrick’s day at school even though no one said we should and no one else did. The eyes of the other students signaled something like, Wow she must really like St. Patrick’s Day. I did, not sure why. But I didn’t need to know why. I sat in class with a plastic green hat, a shamrock light up tie, and leprechaun stickers on my face like a total buffoon—but a lucky buffoon no less. I miss that kid. Then one fateful day my period came. I was the first and only child in Layton, Utah to get her period, and suddenly everything changed. Nearly overnight, I woke up needing to be thin and desirable and popular. I needed to be wanted by the other children. I needed love like a salmon needs to swim upstream and lay their eggs (and then become food for those eggs).

Popularity arrived one fateful day when Jana and Lexie randomly asked me to sit with them on the bus. I have no idea what inspired them to do this, I think maybe my period drew them in and/or the spell I had cast to be popular actually fucking worked. I ditched my current friends—I looked Tina and her sweet little sister Jenny square in the face and said, “It’s been nice knowing ya!”—and promptly made my way towards the back of the bus where the cool mormon girls sat; towards social acceptance; towards my destiny as a “someone” instead of “the weird new girl”.

Sitting on the bus with Jana and Lexie became the norm, and soon I was even invited into the inner inner circle where Chelsey and Kelsey reigned. We had secret handshakes, choreographed dances, and passed letters around of boys we liked. I ditched acting classes for cheerleading and dance. I quit casting silly spells in my room and took up a bonafide eating disorder. I was verily becoming one of them. And then, as soon as I was about to reach peak “cool”, those two little words were uttered once more: “We’re moving.” Shattered doesn’t describe it. For the first time in my little life I felt like I was finally arriving somewhere; in a social scene, in looks, in my herkie cheer jump. Even the boys were finally noticing me. Go figure, I was learning. I’m convinced this later resulted in a year long meth addiction in high school, but that’s another essay for another day.

Somewhere between the blurring state lines, 1999 happened, more specifically as it became the year 2000. The whole world was included in this apocalypse, better known as Y2K—which was somehow semi-comforting. I was 11 at the time and kept hearing that the computers were going to implode from a numerical error as the clock struck midnight on new year’s eve and that all hell would break loose. I was unclear why a little computer glitch would cause such a thing, but I was a naive preteen who still believed anything was possible—in rare glimmers I still do. Little did I comprehend then the complexity of our reliance on these said computers nor their association with evil forces. I mean, this is back when I was chatting on aol with “boys my age” while chugging mountain dew into the wee hours of the morning, as innocently as a bug in a rug.

My parents let me stay at my cousin’s house for the big night. We grew up states apart but still managed to be best friends. Looking back it’s kind of sweet I’d rather spend the last night on earth with her than with them. Cousins have a unique bond, I even think they can be closer than sisters. At a whole one year older she appeared to me as a wise monk. She’d already had boyfriends and first kisses and a flat stomach. It makes sense that she didn’t seem nearly as concerned with the fates we were both about to meet, she’d already achieved so much in life. I pretended I wasn’t anxious for midnight as I sipped the sparkling apple cider her parents gave us.

As the clock approached twelve we counted down and I also counted my blessings. I wasn’t a religious child, but I was on the verge of death and it seemed like the appropriate thing to do, ya know, just in case. 5 - Thanks for all the gymnastics lessons even though I still can’t do a backflip. 4 - I never found love again, or received my first kiss, but I’m grateful for my nap time fling. 3 - Thank you for my imaginary older brother. 2 - Please don’t send me to hell. 1 - Happy New Year! And then… nothing. Nothing meaning something because I was still there. I took inventory of the room, everything was exactly the same. A few streamers, our sparkling apple cider which was now rather flat, and her dad passed out on the couch. Hmm, maybe death takes a minute to kick in, I thought. I waited around for another hour before calling it a night, perhaps in the morning I’d be dead but boy was I tired.

The computers figured their shit out, the sun Earth kept spinning, and I continued existing all the way to the next supposed apocalypse: the 2012 Mayan calendar hurrah. As I recall, the Mayans had a calendar and that calendar was ending (just as all calendars do), and that because of this Satan would finally, finally reign. At this point in time more of my prefrontal cortex had developed from being alive longer, so I could sometimes talk myself out of how silly it all sounded. But with all the hype, catchy headlines, and my newfound chronic anxiety, death by calendar seemed worthy enough of my worry.

I fondly remember I was sleeping with Matt B at the time. A terribly cool young man with the bluest eyes, who I would end up asking via text, “Would you like to spend the end of the world with me?” “Cool question.” he said and obliged. When the day came (whenever that was because it kept moving around, as the end of the world tends to do) I drove an hour to Denver to drink with him and his friends, many of whom found me an insufferable lush. But none of that mattered to me. Neither did the end of the Mayan calendar and whatever that entailed, having a crippling crush on a boy makes even the extinction of your own species seem menial.

I’d since upgraded from sparkling apple cider to wine or vodka or literally anything that gets you drunk. I must’ve blacked out from all the stress drinking, not that blacking out was anything new for me, because I don’t recall going to bed (or dying for that matter). The next morning I opened my eyes with to a vision of Matt sleeping soundly. My head was pounding but my heart on fire as I lie wrapped in his arms, his naked, warm body pressed to mine. We were alive and I was in love! We spent the rest of the day watching movies and ordering in food between sex sessions. A perfect ending to what felt like the beginning.

Naively, I believed those feelings would never end, tragically they did when he called it off just a few weeks later. He said the timing wasn’t good or something, which I received as, “You’re ugly and unlovable and will likely die alone. And you’re fat.” My world came crashing down once more. Why couldn’t I have just actually died a few weeks ago when humanity was ending and we were happily together? I remember now—this is what it feels like to love and lose said love; to be gutted. It stings differently when you’re not six and genitals have been involved.

After many sloppy nights drinking it off and sending weird texts to my now ex, I survived. Life and I trudged along. There were many more heartbreaks after Tanner and Matt, romantic and otherwise. When I was 21 I lost my best friend to heroin. Her and I had been having recurring fall outs at the time. I kept thinking she wanted to sleep with my boyfriend Steve, the lead singer of Stab Crew. Fortunately we made up just before I received the call that she was dead. Her funeral was the first time I realized that drug use could actually kill you. That sometimes the party takes you places you didn’t plan on going¹.

At one point some years later, I remember talking to her dad on the phone. Some of us checked in on him for a while afterward. We chatted for well over an hour but all I recall him saying is, “Some of you just don’t get over the hump. I want you to get over the hump, kid.” I guess the hump he was referring to was the one where you don’t die from an overdose. I did get over the hump, hump by hump. He was right, not everyone does. More friends followed suit after her as their addictions ate them alive. My addictions consumed me too, but I guess I was “high functioning” which really just meant I had a special way of shoving things down and putting on a nice face. My winged eye liner almost touched my temples. Sometimes in the mornings it would still be right there, barely smudged, reaching into eternity for a party that never ended.

After enough false alarms and still active in my addiction, it became easier to quit paying attention to word of upcoming “It’s the end of the fucking world.” My world ended every morning as I desperately tried to recall what I’d done the night before. I had my own problems to worry about. The job I was trying to keep so I could pay for the bar tabs I kept drunkenly walking out on. Fortunately for me, by some grace of godd, my own healing sought me out. Not sure where it found me exactly, whether in a book or something someone said or by finally taking my drinking problem serious enough to consider changing. Nonetheless, I’m eternally grateful it did. Today I’ve been sober from alcohol for three straight years (more if you don’t count all the starts and stops). I do still do other drugs sometimes, but usually only if techno music is involved. Admittedly nowadays, life actually seems harder with constant drug use than without it, which is a miracle for me to say. Maybe I’m lucky. Maybe I’m chosen. Maybe I got to die and resurrect in my very own lifetime, just like Jesus.

Addiction has a lessen for those who dig to the bottom only to find themselves keenly aware that there is nothing there. That what they are looking for cannot be found in a substance, nor that there’s any lasting reprieve from the tune of dread that hums along in the background. In fact trying to escape it only digs the hole deeper and makes the hum more deafening.

Now that I am fully healed and evolved and enlightened, ie. out of the hole part of my living ritual includes a daily contemplation of what my responsibility is to this world, and at least with myself. I wish it weren’t so, feeling that you do in fact have a moral duty and that your actions actually do matter is annoying as fuck. But hey, the jury is still out and I’m still complicit. My goal is no longer perfection, moral or otherwise. I think more than anything it’s just to stay sober which helps me stay curious. My sobriety is important to everything good in my life. It is the pinnacle of my sanity, something that keeps me semi-clear headed whilst living in a world that continually reorganizes. A world that is quite frankly, currently, scaring the shit out of me.

The news/social media never relents on how everything is going to hell; sometimes I stop and ask myself, is this not hell? Children are being blown up so some disgustingly rich men can build hotels, another world war looms or is perhaps already underway, and changes to the climate will soon bring mass migrations and food shortages as our already vulnerable food systems lose the last of their life support. I gotta admit, if there were ever a time to truly fear the end, I think we could agree it’s now. But then I reflect on all of the times I thought the world was going to end, and how the world doesn’t just end—it keeps ending.

The etymology of Apocalypse in ancient Greek means “uncover”; “disclose”; a “revelation”. If we look at it this way, we’re offered some ambiguity from all this darned fire and brimstone. Maybe the world isn’t ending per se. Instead it’s constantly revealing itself in a cosmic rendition of: I’ll show you yours if you show me mine. Then again maybe the world is always ending. If not for me, then for someone else. If not for humanity, then for another species. And there’s nothing we can do to change this fate, and we must go on living like we can anyway, futile as it may be.

The end is funny, it’s ever near yet feels impossible. Death is inevitable, is as common as birth, and yet is too illusive for us to genuinely accept or imagine. The torture of it, to be a walking mammal with opposable thumbs who knows it’s own demise but never exactly when! No wonder we’re all a little on edge. The end is coming. I often wonder why our fated demise doesn’t unify more often than divide, why we don’t feel more compelled to sit together under the stars or lie around naked in the garden instead of snorting whatever traces of money, popularity, and power we can find in the carpet. And even though I am someone who has snorted what I found in the carpet—I don’t have these answers. Really, what do I know? I’m just billions of years of evolution like everything else, guessing at best.

In the “end” though, I’d bet that the entire universe hasn’t put its only bet on sapiens. If it’s a game of odds, the universe rolls infinitely on the playing table of eternity. In the “end” everything we will do and have done and do not do will erode and rearrange, the same way even the tallest mountains become sand over and over again. It’s a tale older than time, so old it’s eternal. Primordial. Illegible. In the “end” the only question worth asking isn’t how can we save the world from its end (that would be a riddle—how can we save that which already doesn’t last?). Instead we might ask ourselves, who do I want to spend the end of the world with? Let’s send that text, see who obliges.

1. This is a line from an Against Me! song that we used to listen to all the time.