My Own Personal Apocalypse

I have stared longingly at this locket so often that the hinges squeak and the picture has begun to fade. It’s been 20 years since I lost Carol and rarely an hour passes when I don’t look to see her face. Carol was among the first to go when this dystopia descended around the world. She wanted to help people and now she’s gone. That’s what you get for your goodwill in this world, you get to die and have the world barely notice.

That’s why I never left this mountain, these four barren walls. Why bother, there is nothing out there for me anymore but my own un-mourned, unnoticed death. Only savagery exists outside these walls so why indulge it, why fight it, why invite in? Carol believed there was a world worth saving outside these walls but she was wrong and she paid for her compassion with her life. Some might consider that noble but they are only trying to force meaning on a meaningless death for their own comfort.

Carol believed in kindness. She believed people were innately good. When this all began she said “Look for the helpers, they’re always out there.” She left out the part where the people needing help turned on the helpers, stomped on their compassion, stole what they could to survive another day, and the ‘helpers,’ as she called them, were left lying in a pools of their own blood. The helpers were easy to find, they all died screaming.

If I sound angry, I am angry. I’m angry at her for trusting these people, I’m angry at her for risking her life for these people, and I am angry at her for dying at their hands. It’s strange but I am not as angry at the people who killed her, they did exactly as I expected them to. If she’d listened to me, and not tried to save them, she’d still be here. I hate them for killing her but, at least, I understand why they did what they did.

The nature of these beasts is to kill to survive. When Carol left to help them with food, shelter, clothing, essentials, they’d already grown desperate and their desperation wasn’t going to end. With the skies turning red and essentials becoming scarce, the paranoia was already driving them mad. Carol thought that giving them resources would stabilize them, give them hope and, perhaps, stem the tide of fear and anxiety that was driving people out of the big cities and toward our rural enclaves.

You may, if you are inclined, admire Carol for her compassion and selflessness, but I am not so inclined. Though I love her more now than ever, my love competes with my anger for space in my heart. The qualities that made Carol so warm, kind, and caring, are the qualities that ended up getting her killed. Those admirable qualities are why I don’t feel her breath on my neck now, those admirable traits are why I can’t touch her and feel her warmth against me now. Those qualities you are somehow capable of admiring, are why the love of my life isn’t here now, where she should be, beside me.

Now, all I have of Carol is a fading photo inside a heart shaped locket, a gift from Carol’s mother, now long since passed herself. She and I may have never gotten along but we respected each other. She also thought Carol was a fool for trying to help these people. It was the first time she and I ever agreed on anything. When I told her that Carol died trying to help these people, she was so disgusted that she threw this locket in the trash. I scooped it up and brought it home.

It’s strange, I can still feel such love and such resentment all at once. It’s stranger still, how these feelings are so meaningless as I lay dying. 20 years of hiding in the hills, living off the land and waiting for humanity to burn itself out, I finally get to die and still, my only thoughts are of Carol, of how much I loved her and how much I hated her for leaving me. Perhaps there is a heaven, perhaps she’s there waiting, or, perhaps there is nothing, I am leaving this world into the next with only this conflict, only this angst, this mix of love and rage that has both sustained me and rotted me away.