Until the End of the World

If you looked around at the trees and the sunshine, the wind blowing through the grass, you would never know that the world had fallen apart. Flowers still bloomed, birds still sang. Rabbits hopped through the fields. The planet has always been good at healing itself. It was the people that were broken. Humanity had been unable to survive the last virus. We thought we had learned, but it turned out that, with all of history to teach us, we never really learned anything.

First the stock markets crashed. Then the banks became useless. What was money in a world where ninety percent of the population was dying? Then the looting started. The first few years it was like our base animal instincts took over. It was every person for themselves. Cities were abandoned as people began farming their own food. Hoarding supplies. Staying as far away from civilization as possible. That’s how you stayed safe, how you stayed away from the virus. It killed us in droves. There was no room for the bodies, so they stayed piled in the cities. Abandoned, but never forgotten.

Eventually people got lonely. We were never meant to be alone. We found ourselves gravitating towards each other, the magnetic pull of our souls overcoming the fear. Living alone was no way to live.

Most of the survivors were children. I was ten when I found my Family. I’d been wandering through what I was pretty sure was California. With my childlike logic, I wanted to find the beach. I had never been, and my parents had died before they could take me. At least, I assume they’d died. When they got the first symptoms, they drove me out into the middle of nowhere when I was sleeping and left me there. I woke up wrapped in a blanket my grandma had made, with my mom’s heart shaped locket around my neck, and a note.

‘We love you too much to risk your life with this. It’s too soon to say goodbye, but remember that we are always with you. We love you until the end of the world. Mom and Dad.’

Their pictures were in the locket.

I don’t remember crying, but I didn’t move for three days. I thought, naively, that they would come back for me. That they would realize that they weren’t sick, and that we could all be together. But after three days my stomach was in knots and my mouth was dry and flaky. My dad had been teaching me survival skills, something he’d learned from his dad, but with a much different motivation. So I knew to follow the rivers, to sleep in the trees. I knew how to light fires and fish, and to only eat what I was familiar with. But in the first week of my walking, I didn’t remember any of this.

I finally ended up on a highway. A huge expanse of asphalt that wound through the trees. It was easier to walk on than the undergrowth of the forest, and it was following the road that I learned I was in California. My ten year old brain immediately wanted to go to the beach, so I headed west.

That was when I found my Family. It didn’t start out as a Family. It started out with a little boy, probably six, hiding behind a dumpster in a suburb of a suburb. Tom.

Next was Avery, skateboarding in an empty skate park in a little coastal town. She was thirteen, but she really didn't want to be alone.

Then finally there was Tyran. Tyran almost didn’t join us. They stole from us for nearly a week before we were able to track them down and tell them that they were more than welcome to sit around our campfire and eat with us.

We were a strange little group, hiding in trees and hunting squirrels as we made our way to the Pacific Ocean. But we made it.

We found a little house ten minutes from the beach. We planted a garden. Avery, Tyran, and I took turns rocking Tom to sleep.

One night, as I held Tom in my arms, he reached up and took my necklace in his chubby fingers. He managed to pry the locket open, and my mom and dad smiled down at him.

“Tell me about them.”

And I couldn’t. I tried to speak, but the words got stuck in my throat.

Every night Tom asked about my parents. And every night I found I couldn’t tell him.

I couldn’t tell him that each morning when I woke up there was a moment. A brief, glimmering moment when the sunlight hit my face that I thought it was my mom’s kiss. Or that as each day passed I saw more and more of my dad in the mirror. I couldn’t tell him that I lay awake at night crying for them. I couldn’t tell him that sometimes I heard my mom’s laughter when the wind blew. I couldn’t tell him these things because he didn’t need to know how many different ways the world could end. For Tom it was a singular event. I relived it. Every day.

But time has a funny way of healing things. I grew, and my eyes began to sparkle with the same warmth my mom’s had. My lips would quirk like my dad’s when I told a bad joke. And instead of hurting, there was joy. Joy that they lived on in me. The wind began to sing with the laughter of Avery and Tyran as they chased each other in the garden. We could’ve been the last four people on Earth, but we tried not to think about that. We tried not to think about the virus, and the lives we’d all lost. We told stories by the fire each night, and played games that we found in abandoned houses. We had a good life, considering the circumstances.

One night, as I was walking the beach with Tom, he asked me once again about my parents.

“Why do you want to know about my parents so badly?”

He shrugged. “I don’t remember mine. When I try to picture my parents, I just see you. So they’re kinda like my grandparents, in a weird way.”

I looked at him. He wasn’t the six year old I’d found behind the dumpster. He was a teenager. And he was a part of my Family. And he deserved to know about his family.

We sat down and I told him about the house I grew up in. The magnolia tree in the front yard, and the lemon tree in the back that my mother had planted when they first moved in. I told him how angry the neighbor would get when our garbage cans would be two inches over the property line. I talked about my dad and his love of fishing, hiking, and baseball. And how my mom would crochet baby blankets for anyone she knew that was having a baby. I talked about my parents for the first time in years, talked until my voice went hoarse and the sun was rising. I finally came to their choice to leave me, so that I wouldn’t have to watch them die, and the note they left me.

“It’s a bit ironic, I grew up with my mom telling me she would love me until the end of the world. I bet she never thought it actually would.”

“But it didn’t.”

I looked at Tom.

“The world didn’t end!” he said. He looked out at the waves crashing on the shore, the sun peaking up over the horizon. “The world is still spinning. The sun still comes up. You’re still alive. The world hasn’t ended. Your mom knew that the world would outlast all of us. Just like her love for you.”

I closed my eyes as the sun hit my face, and I felt my mom’s sweet kiss.

Humanity fell. It was wiped out. But the world never ended.

I clutched my locket in my hand as Tom and I returned to our home.

To our Family.