You Feel It Just Below the Ribs

by Jeffrey Cranor

The idea of an apocalypse is a comfort, because it makes death seem like something we can all experience together, in a single moment, a colorful firework burst. But mostly death is something you keep

to yourself. In reality, the apocalypse is most likely to be you, alone in a room with the flu.

He asked for shelter, but my mother grew upset at being so needed. She was the one with needs. She no longer knew how to give, and she told him to leave.

Once you believe that the end of the world has begun, you are complicit in its destruction.

don’t know if that’s beautiful or sad. That you can find a family—for a while—by simply being thrown together temporarily and coming out the other side, not bonded necessarily but committed.

“No one can hurt me,” she said. “Only I am responsible for my own pain.”

Well, we are all the descendants of societies we cannot understand.

“You haven’t been thinking about your life after this. And that makes sense. No one thinks ahead when they’re twenty, even if they don’t live in a burning world.

I found that in America, kindness stopped at speech.

Rosemary chastised me routinely for my silence and apolitical nature—she did not understand. She claimed that political engagement was a moral imperative, but I think for her it was really just love of the game. She was good at speaking, arguing, maneuvering to get what she wanted, and she liked to win.

I don’t know how we went from understanding how to mentally separate people from their early memories to making it illegal for people to remain tethered to them at all, or even to remember their families. But somewhere along the line, we did.1 And that decision was made consciously and deliberately.

Just as memories can be deliberately hidden, so can memories hide without our knowledge, out of sight of the most prying of eyes. But if you change enough of them, there’s a tipping point over which the others topple.