For Posterity

“Breathe, Mara! It’s okay; you’re okay. Listen to my voice, sweetheart,” I heard my mom choking back tears. “Put your hand on my chest, Mara! Follow my breathing. That’s it, keep breathing, hun. Stay awake.” I could hear the panic in her voice, but I could tell she was trying to stay calm.

I don’t remember much leading up to the impact. It was a Friday, and we had just finished having dinner out as a family. I had been riding in the backseat of my parents’ Volvo. I woke up on the pavement to the sound of my mother’s voice; the smell of the airbags, like gunpowder, burned in my nose. The strong taste of iron pervaded my mouth—blood. Everything went black after that, and I wound up spending a couple of weeks in the ICU. My parents walked away with some minor injuries, but Ethan, my brother, wasn’t so lucky. The drunk driver had hit us on the side of the car where he had been seated— he died before emergency services arrived. We didn’t talk much about the accident. For a while, we acted like everything was fine. We watched movies, played games at the dinner table— all of that stupid “suburban family” ish. We held on for dear life, trying to salvage the best parts of our family that my brother took with him. That facade didn’t last very long, though; inside, we all knew things were never going to be the same. How could they be? Ethan’s death ripped a giant hole in the fabric of our family. He had always been the sort of comic relief in our dynamic.

You could always count on Ethan to lighten the mood, but with him gone, we all grew distant. We were coping the best we could. I think our radio silence gave us all a false sense of peace and comfort. That shattered when my mother got diagnosed with stage 4 liver cancer a few years later. The specialists only gave her 11 months to live. She made it almost eight months before leaving us. My dad cried harder that day than I had ever seen him cry. My entire childhood, I’d only ever watched him be strong. He was the backbone of our family, but any resolve he had been holding onto shattered after my mother’s death. Over the next ten years, I watched him wither away in a pit of alcohol and depression. I tried to help him, but I quickly became the object of his anger and resentment. In my care, I guess I reminded him too much of her. He treated me like I had abandoned him long before I moved out. A small part of me held on to the hope that we could reconcile what little relationship we still had and that I would somehow get my dad back. He died a few days after what would have been my parents’ 34th Anniversary together. I was sitting down on the couch in my apartment when I found out. Something in me broke when I got that phone call. I hadn’t cried since my brother’s death, but I made up for it that night. I was an emotional wreck.

Not long after that, I decided to pack up and move to New York City. Something about it had always appealed to me. We had visited once as a family when I was little. The flashing lights in Times Square were alluring to me. Reflecting on it now, I think it had a little bit to do with an attempt at distraction as well. Distraction from my grief, but also a distraction from reality. A way to escape the fact that I was now completely alone. Sure, I had my job, my friends—but none of that helped me find a new normal. Nothing could. Eventually, I found myself trying to escape the feeling of isolation that I carried so profoundly. I began frequenting the local bars and nightclubs. I started drinking, doing drugs, and sleeping around with random people. I guess I was trying to find something—anything that could help take my mind off the pain. The alcohol and drugs were only half successful; they numbed me for a bit, but my mind always found its way back to the same thoughts. Sometimes I’d think of my brother. What would he have been like now as a grown man—married, maybe with kids, living the simple life that had once seemed to be his destiny before fate intervened? At other times, I thought of my mom and what she’d say to me if she could see the way I was living.

I was still amid my soul-searching when the world began to crumble. One of the most polarizing elections in our nation’s history set off a terrifying chain of events—riots followed soon after. People began vandalizing businesses and burning down buildings as things spiraled further out of our control. I fled the city as quickly as I could. It wasn’t long before the government declared martial law, and military vehicles and personnel began lining the streets. I thought this would put an end to the madness, but it didn’t. When martial law failed to quell the violence, they began firing on protesters. Civil war broke out, and our backyard became a warzone. Airwaves around the world became saturated with nothing but talk of destabilization and chaos. Our foreign enemies began to celebrate our demise. A mass struggle for power erupted as nations began to dispute over who would take the reigns of the free world.

No one ever found out who launched the first nuke, but what followed was the most devastating event in the history of humankind. In the end, our diplomacy failed, and we returned to the weapons of our primitive warfare. Despite our best innovations and advancements, it seems we were destined to end up here. The irony of it all is that they made the masses believe they were powerless to effect change for the better. They gorged themselves on the pleasures and distractions our lifestyles provided—and found themselves consumed in chaos. In the end, it was all just a bunch of bullshit. We placed our future in the hands of tyrants who only cared about human affairs so much as there was power, wealth, and notoriety to be gained.

A week before my mother died, she gave me a silver locket in the shape of a heart. Engraved on it were words that she would often say to me whenever I was frightened as a kid. And so, I leave you with this: whatever distant future you may find yourself in, and no matter the terrors you must face: “be brave and step boldly.” - Mara