“You would have been just fine, I think.”
Once the shock of seeing him wore off, I remembered all the things I’d said to him, the things we’d said to each other, and I wasn’t sure where we stood. That he was at my house was a good sign, but I was uncertain how to act. I tried to cover my awkwardness by telling him about Quiet Oaks and how I finally made my peace with Jesse.
“I’ve still got a lot to figure out, but I like having choices.”
Diego rocked back and forth on his heels, his hands in his pockets. “I’m seeing a therapist about my anger issues. Apparently, it’s not okay to beat the shit out of anyone who hurts someone you love. Go figure.”
“I still think Marcus deserved it.”
“Maybe.”
“And I love you too, you know?”
“I know.” I kissed Diego. We floated free and unfettered. Maybe love doesn’t require falling after all. Maybe it only requires that you choose to be in it. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen with us or how much time we had left, but I wasn’t going to waste a second of it.
Audrey joined us outside, and we walked to the beach together. It was a clear sky full of stars with a bright moon overhead, and we passed the time naming the constellations.
“Did you ever press the button?” Diego asked.
We sat in the sand at the water’s edge. Audrey on my left, Diego on my right. The rest of the world didn’t exist. “The sluggers haven’t abducted me in a while. I would if they’d give me the chance.”
Audrey checked her watch. “There’s still a few hours left until the twenty-ninth.”
Diego leaned his head on my shoulder. “What do you think’s going to happen?”
I’d imagined dozens of ways the world could end, but I still wasn’t any closer to an answer. I watched the sky and wondered where the sluggers were. Why they hadn’t given me another opportunity to press the button and whether they were ever real at all. I didn’t know if the world was going to end tomorrow, nor did I care.
“Honestly? It doesn’t matter.”
Ms. Faraci
I know this isn’t what you had in mind when you assigned me this extra credit project. You probably expected a thousand words on gravity or the four laws of thermodynamics, not a journal recounting the last 144 days of my life—-possibly of all life—interspersed with crazy doomsday scenarios. It’s entirely possible we won’t even be alive to discuss it. The world will probably end in a flood that cleanses the stink of humanity from the face of the planet. No, strike that. It’s the acidification of the oceans that’ll do us in. Climate change causes the glaciers to melt, which causes the acidification of the world’s oceans, resulting in the death of most sea life. This triggers a worldwide food shortage, which leads to wars and the end of mankind.
Or maybe robots rise up and murder us all. Gamma rays from deep space blanket the earth and annihilate all living creatures. A supervolcano erupts or aliens invade or a genetically modified virus is released by a terrorist organization that kills 99.99 percent of all humans, leaving the remaining .01 percent to die slowly of starvation and loneliness.
It doesn’t matter.
Rising temperatures could trigger the release of massive amounts of methane trapped beneath the ocean; a scientist could create a strangelet, which would immediately begin converting all matter it comes into contact with into strange matter, including our planet and everything on it. It doesn’t matter.
Famine, war, nuclear winter, black holes, or coronal mass ejections. It doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter, because one way or another we’re all going to die. A blood clot could lodge in my brain and kill me ten minutes from now; a car could hit you while you’re walking your dog. It doesn’t matter. We could all die, the world could end, and the universe would simply carry on. A hundred billion years from now, no one will exist who remembers we were space boys or chronic-masturbating alcoholics or science teachers or ex-cons or valedictorians. When we’re gone, time will forget whether we swapped spit with strangers. It will forget we ever existed.
And it doesn’t matter.
We remember the past, live in the present, and write the future.
The universe may forget us, but our light will brighten the darkness for eons after we’ve departed this world. The universe may forget us, but it can’t forget us until we’re gone, and we’re still here, our futures still unwritten. We can choose to sit on our asses and wait for the end, or we can live right now. We can march to the edge of the void and scream in defiance. Yell out for all to hear that we do matter. That we are still here, living our absurd, bullshit lives, and nothing can take that away from us. Not rogue comets, not black holes, not the heat death of the universe. We may not get to choose how we die, but we can choose how we live.
The universe may forget us, but it doesn’t matter. Because we are the ants, and we’ll keep marching on.
Acknowledgments