Instructions for the End of the World
When the last light fails, here is what you should remember.
Do not run. The end arrives at walking pace, polite as a meter reader, knocking once before it enters.
Stand in the doorway of the house you meant to leave years ago. Touch the frame where your height was marked in pencil, the marks ascending like a staircase you climbed without noticing.
Open the refrigerator. Eat the last olive, the one nobody wanted, floating in its brine like a small green planet. Taste it properly. This is the last salt you will know.
Do not call anyone.
The phones are already singing their final songs, a chorus of dial tones rising like starlings. Everyone you love is equally elsewhere. This is not abandonment. This is the geometry of endings: radial, equidistant, fair.
Go outside. If there is sky, look at it. If there is no sky, look at what held it up. The blue was never a promise. It was a temporary agreement between light and distance, and the distance has won.
Find a cat, if one remains. Cats understand impermanence. They have practiced it daily, ignoring you, returning, ignoring you again. Let the cat leave when it wants to. Do not follow. This is its ending too, and it prefers solitude for important things.
"The last sound is never thunder. It is something small: a faucet dripping, a floorboard settling, your own breath catching on a word you will never finish."
If there are flowers, smell them. If there are no flowers, remember that flowers existed, that something so unnecessary was permitted to grow for millions of years, that beauty was not required for survival and yet survived.
Sit down. Anywhere. The ground is no colder than the chair. Gravity is still working, which is itself a kind of tenderness. It could have stopped. It did not.
Think of one good thing. Not a great thing. A good thing. The way toast tastes at 3 AM. The particular green of a specific spring. A hand on your shoulder in a room full of noise. Hold that thing in your mind like a stone held in a palm.
It is enough. It was always enough. The world does not end in fire or ice. It ends in memory, which is slower than both, and quieter, and final only when you let it be.
Stand up. Walk a little further. There is always a little further. The end is not a wall. It is a door, and like all doors, it opens from both sides.
Next Read
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For every completed thing there are a thousand half-begun, abandoned at the first difficulty. This is for them.
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2 thoughts
"Do not run." That line alone is worth the read. A poem that counsels dignity over survival.
I keep returning to the second instruction. There is so much unspoken between those words.