Not With a Crash

Not with a crash, right? The world isn’t going to end in a dramatic, cinematic, beautiful explosion but slowly, in cataclysmic moments and movements, in compounding waves—right? That’s what we, as a collective, agreed on. That’s what Phoebe Bridgers intimated in her Chicken Shop interview. That’s what I Know the End sounds like. That’s why we all feel so eerie when we see intense beauty light up our night skies and rainbow-painted radars. We all have this gut suspicion that there won’t be much longer. And while I’m one for hope, one for thinking it can be fixed, reassured by some force within me—that force, once under my sternum, is now between my eyes and is quieter than I’ve ever heard it before.

Things have started to feel like an unremastered version of David Bowie’s albums, and I’m getting nostalgic for 2014 as if that wasn’t actually yesterday.

Mourning has begun for my younger self. I grieve for her and the dreams she had: a big white dress, a house decorated like a Nora Ephron set, a big family with four kids. She just wanted a home full of laughter like the one she had. Yet, every day it seems further away. Not that she couldn’t still have it, but would it be prudent? Would she just be putting pain on more lives? Would she be putting stress and worry on small shoulders? Did her grandmother ever feel this way when her literal betrothed was overseas? When he flew over Russia in 1946, did he question if he’d ever have a house full of laughter?

I can walk out of my apartment, venture less than a mile southwest, and land at the very site of my great-grandmother’s wedding, which took place 100 years earlier. I know where she got off the train in the city during the Spanish Flu epidemic. I know the streets her husband walked as a cop because I live on them. I know the neighborhood my great-grandfather slept in on a park bench when he was homeless, just off the train car he hopped in Alabama. I have swum in the lake they all swam in; I have eaten off their plates; I have locked eyes with them in infancy and photographs. My whole world was once walked in times of turmoil, yet I still feel like I’m the first one to ever feel it.

With the greatest of privileges, I worry about the fate of the world and my role in it, and I’m so sorry to those before me that I take up the precious life they would envy by being scared. I am supposed to be the epitome of the work and dreams and desires they sought, and while I am, I know I am also not because I fear that I will be how it ends—not with a crash, but in slow cataclysmic moments in compounding waves.

Unless—and even though it’s a massive unless—it all works out. Unless I, too, simply feel the fear they felt and, instead of giving in to that fear and mourning a life yet to be lived, I push through. We, myself and others, are humans created out of stacked moments and decisions, so why wouldn’t we be the ones to have the hope to fix what seems unfixable? If we are the children created in the glimmer of eyes that saw the sky from bombers and hands that trembled boarding trains and ships but did those things anyway, wouldn’t that mean those exact seconds of courage and faith are in our genomes too? What if, somehow, the climate gets better, politicians find peace, and we’re all treated as we want to be treated?

Then the bang, the whimper, the crash, the waves of compounding destruction never get to make their sounds. There’s a world where everyone gets to walk to school safely, sit through school safely, swim in the oceans safely, play, eat, sleep, and live safely. There’s a world where I hear laughter of my own creation.