Words at Random

Remembering Things We'd Rather Forgotten

!!WARNING!! Mentions of suicide and death

I remember everything.

I remember the day where my life flashed before my eyes as the skies turned from a vivid red to grey and finally into a void of any and every color.

I remember the screams and how my neighbors committed suicide as a family. I watched them climb the stairs to the top of the apartment complex, holding hands and jumping from the ledge. I saw their bodies hit the pavement and heard sickening cracks and sounds I never want to repeat.

I remember seeing people running to their cars and driving away as fast as they could, not knowing where they were headed but knowing exactly what they were leaving behind.

I remember my dog howling as a plane fell from the sky, crashing into a building a couple blocks down the street, debris scattering and flames erupting everywhere.

I remember the day the world ended.

It was a day like any other, school had finally ended and my friends were eager to do as much as they possibly could that summer. Pool parties, birthday parties, any kind of party with food, people, and alcohol. I had always thought parties were a load of bull but I guess they had a certain charm to them; besides all the drama that is.

I never thought such a good day would have ended so horribly. There was no warning, just a flash, bang, then an end. To be honest, the end of the world isn't exactly easily described. Usually you would think there was more to it, like nukes or the nuclear reactors exploding, maybe the government decided to stop working? Or a new World War?

Only, that wasn't the case here, everything just ended. The skies turned black, the stars were gone, many had thought that the sun had died or something. In the end, no one actually knew what happened. All we could say was that the world as we knew it had ended.

At first, many people tried to survive for as long as they could, building underground shelters or trekking across the world to find the last standing cities. The countrysides became wastelands, the oceans never-ending deathtraps, forests terrifying woodlands filled with dead animal carcasses and a maze that no one could get out of. Anywhere else was just impossible to travel across. Cities were abandoned and left to take whatever you wanted from, many had simply taken food and water or whatever they needed, nothing they wanted.

Television was impossible and only a few radio stations were trying to survive. Technology was almost a thing of the past, phones and satellites had ceased their functions and the only way left to communicate became the little walkie-talkies that were very few and hard to get. Cars, trains, planes, all of them almost stopped working. Airplanes couldn't fly in the skies because light was no longer able to be seen, trains may have had tracks but so many people used them to commit suicide that people just stopped using trains to travel.

Cars were the only way to travel and even then the world would run out of gasoline eventually and soon everyone would have to try to travel on foot or use animals again. But even animals were having a near-impossible time surviving, with their low intelligence and dependence on the light and humanity, many of the more passive species died out, leaving the more dangerous and aggressive animals behind. Anyone who could tame a pack of wild wolves or huge bears was well respected or insane.

My own family and I had decided to go live out the rest of our lives as best as we could on an underground farm. Many underground places actually had a higher chance of surviving than the places above ground because they had lighting, water, and solidity. The only bad thing about living underground was the fact that if the lights ever went out or stopped working for even a second, the place could be flooded with huge insects and evolved underground horrors. Things like Moles had become the new underground transportation, they had evolved over time and become these huge beasts as they were more likely passive and had an easier time navigating the larger they were. Underground shelters usually used them to help transport things or simply kept them as friendly neighbors and helpers, mainly because they kept the larger and more terrifying things in the dark away.

I had lost track of most of my friends, the ones who had decided to follow my family's decision found a place with us underground, the others had left to travel the world for some semblance of a home.

Nobody knew if the light would come back to the surface or if the stars would ever appear in the sky again. All we knew was that we had to keep living and surviving, because that's just how humanity is. We survive.

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As this is the first part, and also the first time I have actually gone through with writing something- and even managing to finish- it's gonna be shaky and probably gonna need some editing. Either way, thanks for reading!

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