Etiquette for the End of the World

Don't be rude. Think about how your words will sound to the person you are speaking to. If it is possible that the words will hurt, then they probably will. Don't make pointed remarks; they will stab. Don't make remarks with jagged edges, or comments so finely honed they will slice easily through even a thick-skinned person.

Don't cough on people. Cough on yourself. Sneeze on your feet.

She felt awful. She wasn't sure if she was sick or just worn down and wretched. It amounted to much the same thing in the practical sense of just getting through another day...and she supposed that in the long run it really didn't matter. In another time she would've wondered if she was depressed, but given the present state of affairs how could one discern a pernicious clinical depression when everyone was, more or less, depressed for very good and valid reasons?

Give anyone in need what you have if you don't need it. We all have things we no longer need and it is often difficult to hold onto possessions. It doesn't matter as much as you thought when you bought it, but receiving it will mean more to the person you give it to than having it does to you.

She wrapped the old red scarf Grant had given her around her neck. It felt like a noose. She loosened it. She never wore red. What had he been thinking? Idiot. But it was warm and had outlasted the relationship by several years. She'd given her favorite blue woolly scarf to a woman who was bare-headed when the first cold front of the year rolled in. She imagined the woman wearing it right now. Maybe it made her happy. Maybe it made her day.

Kindness to strangers doesn't mean that you should trust everyone or that you should allow yourself to be rooked. Not everyone will adhere to these rules of etiquette. People will say that the thin line we have to walk is the line between life and death. We have always walked that line; we just were less aware of it. The thin line that we must walk now is the line between hard-heartedness and soft-heartedness. If you don't know what that means then you are probably on the wrong side of the line.

Of course Jennifer was still around. She was as tough and opportunistic as a cockroach, Grant thought savagely. His mind skittered away from images of April, Cal, Pat, and far too many others. A whole world of faces and memories that he had to keep tamped down. He put a lot of energy into boxing up the past, storing everything but the present in a deep dark archive in his mind. He wished he could just delete everything and everyone from his mind as they one by one, in various ways, were deleted from the world. Except Jennifer. The one person left who knew him well. The only one from his past, really at this point, the only thing of any sort from his past that was also shambling into this shambles of a future. What really ate at him was the knowledge that if he lost her too, he would have absolutely no one, and that was not a good spot to be in, not now, not in this world.

It is poor form to speak of "the good old days" to strangers. The past is not so far past that it can be casually spoken of without evoking a painful contrast with today. Nostalgia can be not only painful, but destructive for some. Caution is advised even among one's closest surviving friends and family. It's unhealthy to dwell too much in fantasies of the past, and discussions of this sort can lead to, or aggravate, depression in many people.

Discussions of the future should ideally be both practical and optimistic, though it is not always possible to incorporate both of these views. Be uplifting as much as possible without being misleading or disingenuous. Be honest, but let it be a gentle honesty.

People hurried down the street to the plaza skirting new piles of debris which seemed to appear daily from somewhere. They're just shifting it from place to place, Jennifer thought, and one place is as good as another I suppose. She paused instinctively when the man next to her tripped on a cable, reaching out her hand, which was ignored as he righted himself and rushed ahead of her to get in line.