The Last of Me
When the world finally ended, everyone had foreseen it but me. I had undying faith in my superhero, but when my foundation shook beneath me, he didn’t come like he said he would. As the sirens wailed, calling for an evacuation, an escape, a shrill, high-pitched sound that warned, “get the fuck out,” I stood still, frozen to what I believed to be holy ground. I was told it was holy ground. The danger was clear and waving right at me, but the fear of what could happen next wasn’t enough to make me run. It wasn’t enough to make me brave. Cowardly, I breathed in the black smoke billowing from buildings that had crumbled in the streets. Towers of daydreams crushed to ancient ruins that history will recall as once beautiful, monumental, irreplicable, and priceless. Oceans rose to unreachable heights, flooding the chambers of cities and the corners of my heart, drowning me in surprise. The rush swept me up and flushed me away, leaving pieces of my being behind for whoever cared enough to pick them up. The water was cold in between my toes, up my spine. It made my throat thick and my heartbeat slow. Poison absorbed my brain like bread soaking up alcohol to erase the haze of drunken decisions that I didn’t realize were bad ones until I woke up hungover.
Someone killed the sun, and the clouds took over, blurring the world to grey, and its been that way since the day he left me, since the day he ended my reign, destroyed my kingdom, stole the fortune, and blocked my calls. The legend describes me now as an idiot, easy to be tricked, and fun to push around. He loves nothing more than to push me around, a pet to a tether, a puppet stuck on strings, a girl who will easily believe anything he says, as long as he says it with his beautiful, brown eyes. I feel like Pinocchio being told that he’s not real. No control over who I am, not good enough to be someone special, not worth the work it takes to become better. Yet, I miss him. I miss him like he fits me just right. All my self-help books villanize him, characterize his personality to be narcissistic, his actions to be selfish, his intentions to be hurtful, and I cry rivers, unable to force a change in my perception of his good nature. I love him, and it’s killing me. How could it be, when he said I was the one who saved him from his own world ending? When his cliff’s edge got close, and the jump didn’t look too high, I pulled him off the ledge. Now, it’s my turn, but I will not be saved by him. The doomsday preppers tried to tell me, tried to talk me to my senses, and the evidence was right there, the research was done, but I couldn’t come to. If whispers of “marry me” plus promises of “I love you” don’t add up to a lifetime together, then what were they meant to mean? Why did they leave his tongue? I can’t take off the ring. It’s glued to my skin, and ripping it from my knuckles will break the very last part of me that’s left, the part that I am clinging to like a lifeline. No amount of tarot card readings seem to heal me, hope doesn’t exist in my dictionary, and I pile my pain in stacks in my bedroom to deal with alone, because alone is what I’m meant to be if he doesn’t want me. It’s pathetic misery, embarrassing to publish on a screen, but true to my current state of emptiness. My desperate attempts at turning lemons into lemonade are earning me very little. I’m emerging slow, my limbs still unsteady from carrying the weight of my devastation, my love for him stagnant with nowhere to go. He’ll find someone else to marry one day, someone submissive and boring enough to sit at his side for company rather than interest, and I’ll still be here, in our deserted town we once walked around like soldiers coming home alive from war. I will get older, yet the feelings will bubble up again, confusing and scattered and jumbled until it becomes a page of word vomit as I struggle to articulate the pictures in my imagination.
All of this to say, when the world finally ended, I did everything in my power to prevent it, and I thought that would’ve been enough. I chose to believe a liar, so I pay the price because it’s all my fault. Tectonic plates crashed into one another, volcanoes exploded, stars fell from the sky, and everything living died. He called me out of the blue, he left his girlfriend to start us new, and I told him I didn’t like the feeling, but he promised we would last forever. When I fell in love with him all over again, it felt like the way the sky looks when the sun is setting. Bleeding, drowning, and dipping into the horizon, it emanates colors that only he could paint for me. I didn’t mean to ignore the end of the universe, I was trying to build a new one with him. Following a blueprint I didn’t create, I was swallowed by the swamp, my body never to be found.
I didn’t want to break up.
In the aftermath, I’ve found myself to be obsessed with putting my body through physical pain in hopes of distracting myself from the emotional knives that stick out of my back, and on my mile-long runs at seven a.m., I ponder about him. My shins shatter along slabs of concrete, my joints creaking at the constant motion of me trying to run away from the situation I’ve created. I mouth along to the music blasting in my ears like a performer, like I’m screaming at him, like he’s standing right in front of me instead of ignoring my confessions of love. My eyes scan gardens of pretty flowers, and I wonder if they would still be pretty if I was buried under them. Sweat drips, my breath hitches, blisters pop, and I try not to fall over. But I feel pushed, he pushed me, all the way to my limit, past my breaking point, and I don’t know who I am anymore. Disconnected with myself, I walk around ghostly, haunting my friends and family, hoping my therapist will send me away. I recall nights where he slammed doors in the middle of arguments, where he hung up phone calls mid-sentence, where he admitted to infidelity, alcoholism, and abusing me. I remember his Dad witnessing it firsthand, his siblings hiding in their bedrooms, and my mouth clamping shut, keeping the secret, getting comfortable in the cage he was keeping me in. I replay the memories of loving him, how warm it felt, like when you spill hot coffee on the front of your t-shirt, or feel a glass of wine seeping into your blood system. I savor the kisses, his touch, the graze of his hands on me, the way I fit into his body like we were made by the same potter, the times when he wanted me. I think he hates me now. It’s a lot of hate for someone who didn’t do anything, who didn’t lift a finger, didn’t protest, didn’t break the rules, didn’t hurt him, ever. I would never hurt him, ever. He always has and always will hurt me.
When he walks into bars and basks at the beach, I hope he remembers, too.
As I stare at the destruction, I don’t know where to turn next. Nothing makes me feel better. I cry constantly. Midnight keeps me company. An absent appetite pains my stomach. I try so hard not to think about him that all I do is think about him. I keep track of how many days it’s been since I’ve seen him. I turn off his favorite songs. I beg the sky for forgiveness. I replay my childhood in my mind, wondering what led me to this fate. I hesitate to blast off into space. I’m not ready, but I think it’s time to let him go. Aliens will discover this planet of ruin millions of years from now, and it will fascinate them. They’ll find parts of him and I that were left behind to rot, deformed and decayed from years of being forgotten.
When the world finally ended, and he killed every last part of me, it was revealed that that was his plan all along.