When The Darkness Takes Us: Jess's Story

We All Imagine What We Want it to Be

I should care more about this. I know that I should because everyone else cares so much. It's all over reddit. All over Twitter. All over Slug. All over Youtube. This is my world. The internet and this collection of websites and it's my escape from the physical world that I'm forced to inhabit. All of this end-of-the-world business has consumed this world.

'Can't believe this is happening...'

'Time to purge!'

'There's nothing in any of the stores near me! They're empty!'

'Heard there's been a run on meat and toilet paper.'

'What are we gonna do?...'

I don't get the big deal. Fifteen years is so long. More than long enough for me.

Logging off, I decide to take a walk. Go outside for once.

Hustling down the sidewalk, I can feel something combustible in the air. The streets aren't any busier than usual at this time of day, but something is off. Something in the way strangers' eyes almost meet. Something in the way the paces of some are far too fast, darting around their fellow pedestrians like obstacles on a course, and others' gaits are purposefully slow like they have nowhere at all to be—or if there is somewhere they should be, they don't want to get there.

I arrive at my favorite coffee shop and give the door a push. It doesn't open. Peering in close to the glass, I see that the lights are off. I take a step back and notice the sign taped just above the door handle. Don't know how I missed it before. 'Closed due to recent disaster news.'

I frown, staring at the stupid little sign. It's sloppily hand-written in black sharpie on a wrinkled piece of printer paper. Why close the coffee shop over something that won't even happen for fifteen years? So what....the world is going to end. It's not like we didn't know that eventually we'd die. Now we've just got an exact expiration date to plan for. I almost like the certainty of it a little better. It's nice knowing I only have to make do for another fifteen years. I'm almost thirty, so fifteen years is just a little more than half of the time I've been alive already. I only have to do this life thing for another half of what I've already done. I can do that. Totally manageable.

I've never been happy. I've always felt this heavy, this agitated, this....dead. That's why dying doesn't scare me. I already feel dead.

In the park a quarter mile from the coffee shop, I find a place to sit. There's hardly anybody about, save for the homeless guys. They're the only ones I've come across today who don't have that weird combustible energy—an energy that seems ripe to spill over into panic at any moment. Yelling Guy isn't yelling today. That's good. The lanky bald man, who lives in a halfway house near the apartment I shared with Trevor, is mumbling to himself with hands in the pockets of his tattered beige coat. On the bench opposite me sits Bearded Guy. I give him a wave and he shakily stands and ambles over.

"Change today, miss?"

"Yeah, I got you." I dig into my wallet. All I have is a twenty. I almost tell him I was wrong and that I don't have anything, but then I realize that if I keep the twenty, I'll just end up spending it on bullshit anyway. This guy should go hungry so that I can buy a bunch of iced coffees, drink a quarter of the cups, and then throw them away? I don't think so. I hand him the bill.

He takes it, looking down at the bill in surprise and then up at me like he's not sure how to handle this.

"I don't need it," I tell him. "We're buddies. You can have it."

I don't want him to thank me too much or make too big a deal out of this. Bearded Guy knows I have his back. Whenever I go to the library to write, I bring a loaf of bread and a couple of cans of tuna fish-the kind with the tab, since I'm sure he doesn't have a can-opener. He's always too filthy to be coming from a halfway house like Yelling Guy. Think this guy is legit homeless homeless. In the winter, the library lets him sleep upstairs in the reference room. When I see him there I leave the paper bag of sandwich materials and bottled waters next to him. If he's awake, we usually chat for a few minutes. He always calls me 'miss' and thanks me way too much and makes me feel really weird about the whole thing. I almost prefer Nasty Guy who haunts the train station. Anytime I give him change or food, he says "Is that it, bitch? Gimme a cigarette." And literally every single time, I have to tell him that I don't smoke, which makes him spit on the ground in front of me and stomp away cussing me under his breath the whole way. Not pleasant, yet preferable to the bowing and scraping this Bearded Guy does. I'm not better than him and it's pure luck (and probably gender) that has the money in my hand and the roof over my head. He shouldn't treat me like I'm up on some plane he isn't on. He does though and as uncomfortable as it makes me, I'll keep finding him in the library to bring him sandwich stuff and water, because he's much more lucid than the other homeless men. This tells me something happened....something not good....I wonder what it was....