You Feel It Just Below the Ribs

by Jeffrey Cranor

it didn’t feel like an apocalypse. It just felt like life.

I grew up at the end of the world, and all that mattered was what was for dinner.

But the end of the world comes with neither whimper nor bang. It unfurls its blossoms slowly, majestically, one moist black petal at a time.

The war was messy and sprawling, having nothing to do with land or resources or acquisition. It was driven by nationalist identity crises and temper tantrums. It was waged by vast families with hurt feelings and destructive weapons, standing under flags.

We tend not to look too closely, so we miss the fact that disease, wars, and storms linger long after they’re gone.

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.

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

hiding from German soldiers. Or maybe they were English. Maybe they were French. They were men with guns. That’s all that really matters.

How many times can you filter a memory before it’s really just a fiction? How can you tell how many times your memories have been filtered?

time reduces memories to their least complex forms.

We were alone together for long enough for it to feel normal.

How do I protect myself from those who have nothing left but rage?

Sometimes you get to the point where surviving takes so much work that you begin to ask yourself if it’s worth it.

for some people, the amount of labor it takes to accrue the supplies you need to live through a day outweighs the value of the day itself.

Sometimes in war it comes down to you or someone else, and both of you are innocent. Or neither of you are. It’s the same thing, really.

You do the best you can, and the only morality you have to cling to is the knowledge that you didn’t choose to be there. A set of powerful men, who never even knew you existed, put you there.

Those men and their nations destroyed the world. All I did was survive it.

Maybe it’s because, when it’s written down, when it’s rendered into academic abstraction, history doesn’t really bear much resemblance to real life.

A history textbook is a telescope’s view of the universe.

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

Who, somehow, were surprised when the war came back to them in the form of swarming riots. Leader after leader sent armies crawling across muddy fields, thousands of miles in all directions, and then were surprised when one came into their homes, tracking dirt across the carpet.

I slept soundly and fully while mortar shells fell across the world. It’s peace that’s kept me awake. I slept while the world was destroyed; I lie awake now that it’s rebuilt.

Comfort is dangerous. It is the illusion that nothing will ever change even when things are changing constantly, right in front of you.

“Shouldn’t you do something?” I asked Elsa, after a while. “Shouldn’t you fight back?” She looked at me, a little puzzled. “Why?” she said. “What would it accomplish? Helen’s feelings aren’t my responsibility.” “But she’s hurting you,” I said. “No one can hurt me,” she said. “Only I am responsible for my own pain.”

I was deferring responsibility, I suppose, but isn’t it the right of a child to defer responsibility?

When you look back, you see the magnitude. You don’t see the detail. The everyday, gray detail.

I didn’t understand how only a few years away erased my instinct for home, for family?

The only realization left to me was that humanity had turned against itself so utterly as to destroy everything around it.

Wealth exists somewhere, and it must be found and shared. Wealth cannot corrupt if it is not consolidated. Violence cannot operate without tools. And above all, tribalism begets fear, which leads to aggression.

She had no weapons against brittle, determined ignorance.

The writer of this manuscript seems to believe, or to be trying to make us believe, that the current structure of our world was put in place simply by those loud enough to demand it. That the rules we follow were invented by opportunists. If she were right in this, it would follow that the society we live in is little more than a global cult.

I am haunted as I write this. Surrounded by people I spent the best part of my life trying to forget. Would it have been easier if I’d kept them with me? A little bit of pain every day instead of the flood all at once now—now, when I need focus more than I need regret?

Each day wrung me out to the bones, and the knowledge of the coming day robbed me of rest.

I am not by nature a teacher. I lack the skill of divining a path from someone else’s ignorance to my own level of knowledge. I cannot see where the first step is on the journey, because I have left it so far behind.

It’s probably strange for children born now to imagine this, but until the end of the Great Reckoning, there was no universal income, no universal education, no universal career guidance. Wealth was kept within the tightly guarded borders of nations, of governments, of businesses, and of families.

We were an orphaned people in the Reckoning.

They would lose momentum because it’s hard to rise up against a government that’s giving people everything they need. Even if that same government is taking something away in the process.

It is one of the universe’s deepest and cruelest jokes that it takes a lifetime to learn the lessons you need in order to live.

The way we live now has been the way we live for long enough that it feels permanent. Unimaginable that it should change. That it should ever have felt different.

“We’ve always done this!” someone will cry when they feel their habits threatened. But in reality, no. We’ve done this for, what, fifty years? For no time at all.

Irrelevant. Anyway.

Given no other option.6

Its like theres 2 narratives. Her writing and the state commetary and "official" account in the footnotes

People were afraid.” “Of what?” She laughed again but quietly this time. Sadly. “Ghosts,”

They tried really hard to be part of the community, but the community didn’t try back.

We got married on a cold, gray, damp day, and everything was beautiful. I didn’t need sunbeams because I had her.

There is a woman out there who exists because Teresa decided that she should, and how lucky everyone who knows her must be.

As the New Society was protecting the lives and minds of children, was it dismissing the needs of adults?

And then I let myself go. I sat at the table and cried, until I felt like I’d brought the whole sea back with me.

I didn’t see the future—I chose not to ask the questions that would have allowed me to see the future, and I have to live with the consequences.

I wish I could go back now and tell her not to be. People should doubt, I think. Maybe doubt would have saved us.