The End of the World Running Club: A Dystopian Survival Thriller About Endurance and Redemption

by Adrian J. Walker

I believe what I believe to make life less terrifying. That’s all beliefs are: stories we tell ourselves to stop being afraid. Beliefs have very little to do with the truth.

Creatures of denial who have learned not to be afraid of our closets. We need to see the monster in the room before we scream.

We think that language binds us, keeps us close, but sometimes I wonder how far apart we really are. We can make a million assumptions from the movement of an old man’s hand. Most of them are probably incorrect. All we have to go on is our own skewed window on the world. We’re like hermits living in the attics of big houses on lonely hills, watching one another with broken telescopes.

It’s hard being a human. Most of the time we’re just blind idiots seeking joy in a world full of fear and pain. We have no idea what we’re doing, and on the rare occasions when we get things right, we’re just lucky. Our lives are filled with the humdrum: dust and noise with no meaning. And yet they contain moments that seem to mean something, something we can’t describe but want to. Those moments leave holes we want to fill. We want to name them, paint them, teach them, sing them. But we can’t. We can’t because when we try, the hole disappears, and all we can see is the imperfect, unrecognizable imprint of our own crude imagination.

In the end, I thought, this is how we all end up: running alone through our own wilderness, the landscape of disjointed events that form our lives, with nobody to make sense of it but ourselves. The road is ours, and ours alone.