1/2 + 1/2 = 1

There was a great whir, a great howl, followed by a great bang, and the house around me came crashing down. That was how I thought the world would end.

I woke up by myself. The sky was grey, and I did not know how many days had passed since the bombing. The house was in ruins, and the landscape was a plain of broken concrete and bent steel beams. There was no trace of my father. I rummaged through the rubble and found the only thing still intact - half a photograph. There was my father, and myself as an infant, in his lap. Next to him was my mother, nothing but half a face, and half the heart locket she was wearing.

I searched the city in dismay. There was nothing left, no living beings, not even a dog I may rescue for companionship. The world was hell, and I was living in it. I found a little Vespa that I could ride to escape the remains of this urban center, of what had been the greatest city in the world.

I was so alone, and for many years I was by myself. I stopped counting by the third year. I talked to myself so that I wouldn't go mad. But I was so alone, so alone. I did not stumble upon a single creature during those years. Not even the trees were alive. They were grey, cold, and jagged, like everything else in the world. I subsisted off of berries and nuts for a bit, but I realized that I needed to live. So, I went back to the cities and searched in what used to be grocery stores and gas stations, and I found canned food.

A godsend.

I met the woman. She was there as well, at the canned food aisle one day. She was a little younger than me. In the beginning I was terrified, but later I began crying. I knew I was alone no longer. I thanked whatever and whoever, and I began talking to her.

We hit it off right away. She was a fantastic conversational partner, and it seemed that she had been alone the entire time as well. She had traveled across the country, from the opposite side of where I was. She looked for someone, for anybody, and for those several years she hadn't found anyone either. We shared many of the same interests in food, in movies, in books, even our mannerisms were the same.

We spent many days together, before deciding that we should head for the beaches. I had spent my entire time near the city, and she had never seen the eastern oceans. My Vespa was a goner by then, but her SUV was fantastic. She was a mechanic, and she had managed to lug it along, finding gas stations here and there, across the whole country. We packed it to the brim, full of canned foods, and set out towards the misty beaches of the eastern coast.

We spent our first night together under the smoky stars. It was beautiful. I didn't realize how much I had longed for connection until that night. It was then that I thought I might know what love was. My father was a cold man, and I was a loner in school. No friends, no connection, and I had grown up motherless. This woman, she was everything I could have hoped for, and she became my entire being, my love, in this cold, dead hell of a world. It was romantic, the last two humans on earth making love under the open sky.

The next several weeks were beautiful and entrancing. The grey world seemed colorful, our days were full of hope and wonder as we marveled at the natural landscapes of what had been. Even some of the rivers had repopulated with fish, but we dare not touch them for they were strange and mutated.

We laughed at the sky, pointing at what would have been stars and moon past the grey clouds of nuclear fallout. We smiled at the light showered upon us from the glowing, grey orb that we remembered to be the sun. Each day was new, each day was paradise, and each day was something to be looked forward to.

We talked about endless things, of our schools, of our homes, of our favorite subjects. We spoke of our upbringings - she with only a single mother, a warrior in the cruel world, me with my single father, a cruel warrior in the world. I felt more kinship and connection than ever I had known, and I felt as if my heart would burst from my love for her.

One day, she was washing herself in a subterranean lake we had found inside of a cave, and I came upon the pile of clothes at the entrance. Smiling, I began folding them nicely, because I had never known anyone to dislike coming upon a nicely folded stack of clothing when they finished their bath.

Out of her pocket fell a photograph, or rather, half of one. I picked it up, and suddenly my life began quivering before my eyes, and I hoped with my entire heart that my eyes were deceiving me. I pulled out the photograph from my own pocket, and I realized a terrible truth. For we were truly two halves to a whole. The face was made whole, and the heart locket at my mother's neck was made whole as well.

For in the photograph that she carried with her, I saw that my mother had been pregnant with child. I reached deeper into the pocket, and I pulled out the same locket as in the picture. It would have been well, if my father had spoken of this before, but of course he wouldn't. I had never known a man as bitter and hateful as he, but in that moment I wondered if even he could feel this much hate, for my anger at him was unfathomable. If only he had told me more of the wife who had left him!

I set the locket and photograph back into her pocket, and I placed my own within my jacket. The world was grey and terrible once more. For now I realized that I had traded a grey hell for the terrible realization of a horrid truth. Now I asked myself, should I be, or should I not? The world was gone and fallen, and it was only the two of us in the world. I supposed I could escape the horrible truth, but at the cost of the hell of isolation it would bring upon the one remaining. It was at that moment that I realized that I could not bear to have her know what I had come to discover. I would live within my eternal hell within my own mind. I tore my photograph and burned it wihin our campfire, so that she may be spared the torturous, cruel truth of it all.

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The man I had found months prior was no more. I came out of my cave bath, anticipating a smiling face, eyes filled with love for me. My mother passed away early, leaving me only her heart-shaped locket, an empty shell of one. She left no memories of a father to me, nor did I find such love from the many families I was passed through. When the world ended, I counted it among my blessings. Because I was alone, and I had grown used to that feeling.

But after many years, I realized that alone was different from self-imposed isolation. As I traveled through the country, I found I no longer wanted to be alone. So when I came upon this man, filled with love for me, I began standing on my own two feet, and I began believing that I could bravely face whatever this new world thought to throw in my direction, if only it were the two of us facing it together.

But after my bath the man had changed. His eyes were dull and dead, and his face was a constant mask of pain. What had happened? I thought. Was I so undeserving of love, that even when I was only one of two humans remaining that I would lack it once more?

I tried asking him what was wrong, but he would only mumble, or would disregard what I had asked entirely. The dark cloud began settling on my heart once more, and I looked out the car window at the grey waste.

I returned from a bathroom break to find him gone. He was nowhere to be found. I cried in despair, suddenly terrified at the prospect of being the last one alive in the world. Because now my isolation was not self-imposed, but true isolation, in a world devoid of life. I followed his tracks, but they were lost at the fields below the forest. I saw no hint of him over the horizon.

Why was the world so cruel to me? It would have been better if I had never met the man. Why had the world allowed me such love and comfort, only to snatch it away from me? I fell onto my knees and sobbed, and cried, until I was only whimpering. For the love that had blinded me with color was removed, and I saw the world for what it was. A grey wasteland, in which I was alone, alone, forever.