Say No To Sin

It’s been ten years since I’ve last written a novel. Everything went haywire on August 1, 2033. I was born on October 3rd 1998, and the first thirty years of life went smooth. I wrote my first novel in 2018 and after the first, the second, and so on. My novels became a franchise spanning to movies and merchandise, I had it all; including a girlfriend. We met three years before the disaster; she died in a car crash. Now all I have is this heart shaped locket.

I gifted it to her after our year and six months anniversary. It’s a twenty-four carats chain and a heart shaped ruby, open the ruby and inside is a picture of her that I placed shortly after her death. Brown and reddish hair, deep dimples and closed eyes because she’s smiling; a glowing beauty. She’s beautiful. I’m tearing up and the tears run down my cheek as I’m looking at the photo. Thanks to the fire next to me, I’m able to see her tonight. It’s been five years since she’s died and the thought of her still passes by randomly. I ask God everyday, “When will I find the love of my life?”

Over the years since the disaster a group of strangers (who are now my family whom I’m growing to love everyday) and I worked together and created a community which now consists of fifty-two because a woman is giving birth today. I’m an optimist, and have the upmost confidence that the birth will go well; that baby will be the fifty-second family member.

It’s been two days since my last entry. The baby is a boy, and he’s healthy and in proper care with the women of the family. Eliza is the primary caretaker. The mother of the boy, before she died, named him Abraham, and passed him to her best friend Eliza. The father of the boy passed away two months before the birth, protecting a group of women who were close to being kidnapped by a group of bandits. We killed the bandits, but not without our injuries. He felt the slice of the machete in his kidney and died shortly from rapid blood loss. Abraham’s parents, Jacob and Allison, are now buried together in a designated graveyard nearby.

The nuclear disaster caused by warring countries threw us back a couple thousand years in human evolution and society. The group of bandits aren’t the only sinful savages that we’ve encountered in this hunting and gathering society. Killing has become a part of life and fear has kept us in the same place for two years, and soon we’re going to have to move. We’ve been staying in wooden houses (made to the best of our ability) in Jamestown, Virginia off the shore of James River. Apart from the few bad encounters with our savage neighbors we’ve been doing well (thanks to the grace of God), but we want to meet more of our brothers and sisters with the hope of living a more prosperous life. We’ve all agreed to it and plan on leaving in three days.

We’re leaving today. The sun is slowly rising and we’re making our way towards it before it reaches its peak, then we will rest and continue until nighttime. Three of us are staying here and a pair are going north to New York. I remember seeing that city in ruins. It was one of the few major cities to get hit along with Washington D.C. and Los Angeles. I was in New Jersey at the time of the nuclear disaster. My girlfriend and I were spending time with my family in their home when suddenly an explosion appeared with a gush of wind and a heat wave. It knocked me out unconscious and when I woke up everything was in ruins. The wailing was monumental. It was an apocalypse. My family and girlfriend survived, but soon after my family died from radiation. My girlfriend died three months later in a car crash due to us escaping from a group of people who were shooting at us. I’ve come to believe God is saving me for a purpose and slowly I’m beginning to find love again.

The groups are saying their goodbyes and I’m sitting on the shore writing after having thrown the locket in the river. I don’t regret it. I have faith.

We’re making our way now and I’m carrying Abraham on my chest with a scarf that I wrapped around myself. While walking slowly I’m writing this passage. I have lost all fear. I have faith.