Someday (adverb): a future date, paradoxical in its specificity and lack thereof, e.g., the world will end ‘someday’. An optimistic nihilist’s criticisms of humanity’s foibles as we fast approach the time when ‘someday’ becomes now.
You’ve visited this nothingness before—the thoughtless space between the great dream and rebirth. But this time is different. This time, every molecule and atom screams at you, this is all wrong. Nature weeps from your cracked skin, sunlight scorches your shade, sirens wail between your ears.
It’s been billions of years since your elementary molecules developed, during which you’ve spread to every depth and risen to every height. You’ve been a mountain, a river, many insects, several mammoths, but this… this final form is your least favourite. With none of the grace and all of the complexity of life, your limbs flail with futility, your head aches with greatness, your stomach squirms with ambition.
You feel it—an imbalance, an amalgamation of imperfection, a quelling of ubiquity—and you are finally ready to die for the last time.
6 a.m. Monday.
You wake—hand outstretched to the ceiling—to an earth-shattering explosion, sure the world has ended. A quick check of the news tells you it hasn’t yet.
You shake off the unsettling dream and pull on your work clothes, wondering dully how everyone would react if you left the apartment in your underwear. It wouldn’t matter, would it? Nothing does anymore, except what you make of it. At least, that’s what your philosophy professor told you before his existential crisis and indefinite sabbatical.
Outside it is pouring so hard the gutters are white rapids, and though you try to jump over them it turns out the whole street is a giant, sunken crater. When you board the bus, your hair and sleeves are waterfalls.
Standing in the morning rush, you wonder, how do we go back around the bend? Where do we go after the future’s end?
The answer is nowhere. Instead, we hide away within ecological nightmares, boast of monuments that graze the sky and journeys to the moon: the sole remnant of a colliding planet from billions of years ago, without whose decimation none of our atoms would have fallen into place in some precise way that imperfectly became our dotty skin and crooked noses and balding heads.
But our monuments, our art, our superior intellect, have not prevented the world from screeching to an emergency stop. For the train going off the tracks at the edge of someday, the precipice of the end of all things.
But even at the end we must eat and defecate, rinse and repeat, so we still hit the grocery stores for the same products each week, tapping our plastic cards and trickling away precious triple digits on lactose-free milk and antidepressants and grated cheese.
You write yourself a different shopping list, today:
- A car. Preferably one of those 80s ones with the cool wood panelling and the open roof, no matter how impractical it sure looked cool in that movie, the one with that A-lister in the sunglasses.
- A space shuttle. Not one of those lame white models that NASA uses, a red one, shaped like a big ol’ dick with little legs and balls at the ends.
- A new planet, clean and green and immune to the disease of humankind, and where pizzas grow on trees.
- Jell-O. Strawberry.
5 p.m. The day after Monday.
The static on the radio has cleared; it’s another invasion, or another inane court ruling, or another bombing closer to doomsday. You get them all mixed up nowadays; they’ve ceased to mean anything, even though they should mean everything.
Numb to the panic, you twist the dial ‘til it reaches static again. The white noise hisses a feeble warning.
We have become bystanders in the ego war, because what can we do when the guns, tanks and bombs are not the deadliest weapons? When the greatest threats, hardships, and horrors are brought upon us by flesh, blood and bone: people who smile and laugh and dance and shit and fuck, just like us. From them, we can’t run, can’t fight, can’t escape—at least not until Musk has figured out Mars, and you hit nine zeroes, earning you a one-way rescue to Neverland.
We have our voices, but so do they—and we are just people, and they are demons. And we were taught to fight demons with holy water, silver bullets and wooden stakes, but if you tried that, you’d be bent over the hood of your dad’s four-by-four, cuffed in the way you don’t like, and sent to a fifty-year summer camp, so don’t even think about it.
10 p.m. Wednesday.
Class again—for which you’re sinking thousands into debt—followed by a ten-hour nightshift.
After the fifth argument, the fourth smashed glass, and for the third time, ma’am, I can’t remake your meal because you’ve already eaten the whole thing, and no, you’re not getting a refund, and don’t you dare reach into my tip jar, you wonder what would happen if you slammed your head on the counter in a fit of built-up rage, and if it would hurt that much or if you’d just knock yourself unconscious and be sent to the hospital, and if so, which of your friends would come rushing to visit you, ask what happened, provide their unsolicited psychoanalyses.
You feel like crying with the unfairness of it all, but you have no one to tell your woes to, because everybody else is too busy trying to live before they die.
You know there are people worse off than you who don’t have a home to lick their wounds in. But that doesn’t change the self-loathing or the desire to build a fort, crawl into it, read bad young adult fiction and vanish off the face of the Earth for days or years or a century, by which time the planet will have healed over from the apocalypse and we’ll all live in little villages in the countryside again, telling campfire stories about the sins of the old world.
A text from your best friend, who you haven’t heard from since they started dating that guy from their work that you don’t like. Dinner tomorrow? X.
Pain, in your hand: a splinter of glass. How’d that get in there?
Experimentally, you drag it across your skin.
7 p.m. The day before Friday.
Your friend tells you about their exciting new internship, and their exciting new relationship, as though fire and brimstone won’t smite all that beyond memory any day now. You don’t have an exciting new anything to tell them about, so your attention wanders to the masses.
Families inhale their dinner, couples drink too much wine, salary men harass the wait staff. Even now, when going about your life can get you killed, they would rather be out here breathing too much fresh air with strangers than huddling at home waiting for revolution in the meltdown of modernity.
Your mum calls when you get home, but you let it ring. You’ll call her back later. Make a note, before you forget, stick it on the—
Damn. You’ve left the fridge open all day. You reorganise what can be salvaged and throw away what cannot. Your phone dies as you pour the milk down the sink.
White puddles on grey metal. The ringing ceases.
11 p.m. Friday.
Dragging yourself to town, through a wind so piercing it bites your soul, to a hall of intoxication beyond a blinding neon sign, you tell yourself you’re staying in control tonight, that with your luck, as soon as you take a shot the sky will fall.
Dancers shake and writhe, jump and jive. You have to choose carefully where you stand, somewhere you can sway and nod with the rest, ready for a quick escape. Somewhere you won’t slip on the empty glasses rolling about like on the deck of a ship.
A pair of twenty-something-year-olds find each other in the corner by the bathrooms. They were both waiting for their friends to finish emptying themselves of poison, but now they no longer care; they could move planets with their flirtation. They leave hand-in-hand, with the excited determination of two people about to realign the constellations.
Synths, bleeding daggers, blare like air raid sirens.
1 a.m. Neither Friday nor Saturday, somehow.
The girl at the bar has come here at the in-between of night and day, searching for ecstasy. She’s encountered only lechery. She glances at the man beside her, takes her gin and tonic and turns to go. He grabs her by the arm and smiles salaciously.
You want to help, but she leans into the man’s ear and says something that is lost to you under the whoops of the crowd. The man lets go and orders his drink, glancing furtively around.
The girl pushes through the teeming, many-limbed body of the night, and stops. For a moment it looks as if she’s thought better of coming here. That she’d be better off at home in pyjamas, sipping hot cocoa and watching reruns of Gilmore Girls.
But then a song comes on and she cocks her head to the loudspeakers. So do you. It’s something you first heard when you were ten, a terrible song with terrible lyrics, but the bass kicks you in the chest and reawakens a primal childishness.
The girl—about your age—meets your eyes. An understanding passes between you. You’re both jaded old kids now. But whenever this song plays, it’s enough to go back, if only for two minutes and fifty-six seconds.
She grins, runs over to you and grabs your hand. You jump up and down, both of you screaming your lungs out with half-remembered words, and you realise that sometimes it’s better not to be in control.
Later, throwing your guts up in the gutter, you remember that you haven’t had control for years, since some arbitrary day in 2016 when things went to shit and just never stopped.
The clocks have stopped. Someday.
They tell you not to feel guilty for doing nothing on Sunday. That it’s a day of rest, that God himself did nothing but stare at the vast expanse of fields and oceans on the seventh day, smoking a cigarette. You would if you could, but it takes a few hours to get anywhere with fields or oceans, by which time the day will be halfway over, and the world will have ended.
The screaming seeps into your awareness like water down a pane of glass, washing you over. The radio broadcasts an emergency warning which is abruptly cut off along with the power. The sun is blotted out. You hear the neighbours lock and barricade their doors as dogs bark and babies scream.
Catastrophe has bred mass panic, and the reverse is also true. But they’ve been saying this day was coming for as long as you’ve been alive; in a way, it’s a relief it finally decided to show up in style.
Your only thought as the enormous red storm cloud roars over the continent, turning your arms, chest and face to ash and finally putting the chaos of Earth out of its misery, is that you should have called your mum back.
You watch over your ruined world with cosmic eyes, unseeing and unyielding. Nowhere and everywhere. Waiting eternally to become. This is what you were before, what you are now, and what, even after your next rebirth, life, and death, you will be again.
Here, after the future’s end, past the edge of someday, is where you wait with the rest of the energy that was humanity, for yet another chance. You know it will be, sure as the sun will rise—though that is less certain now—for it has been many times before, but a nagging voice, a last vestige of consciousness, asks, What if this is simply it—the last chance already wasted?
Looking fondly back on all that you were, from beginning to end, you think: What a shitty way to go.
THE END
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