The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

by Franny Choi

By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already ended. It ended every day for a century or two. It ended, and another ending world spun in its place. It ended, and we woke up and ordered Greek coffees, drew the hot liquid through our teeth, as everywhere, the apocalypse rumbled, the apocalypse remembered, our dear, beloved apocalypse—it drifted slowly from the trees all around us, so loud we finally stopped hearing it.

Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe. Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in. I want an excuse to change my life.

Human History, a front parlor infinitely painted over with massacre, and into the fray came I, highly allergic, quick to cry, and armed with fat fists of need.

If I’m king of anything, it’s being late. Omw, I type, though I’m still huddled in last year’s mistakes.

O year, O shitstorm, it’s impossible to be alive, impossible to be dead. So, brainlessly, I tongue the news again, instead.

The good news is that things will go back to the way they were, which is also the bad news. Meanwhile, I cut an onion, and it’s onions all the way down, and that’s a fine reason to cry at the sink on a Monday after the empire congratulates itself on persisting again.

How many Wes did they cut out of me? And whose country was I standing on, the last time we survived?

Headline: the unthinkable’s already, already happened again—and so Layleen’s perfect face swings back into the orbit of my grief— Catch up—it’s the anniversary of the aftermath of another bad massacre, and I’ve got plenty of seats.

I’m a child of immigrants, of strategic importance, of imports from one immolation to another. Pay my honest mother in taxes and guilt.

someone unremembered inside me is wailing; wailing; someone else’s song crawling backwards from my mouth.

Our names were napalm, ravaged paddies, lung cancer. Names, like ghosts, reverberate. The bad memories in the body? They climb to the surface, from war’s muck. War: the only surname on our unmarked graves.

I stand at the beach to watch history unrot, unwaft, walk back into the water. So long, origin- storyteller.

Everything I didn’t know was a throatful of something hot and bothered: the hair crawling up my calves; the shock that flew through me when Alex drew a picture of sex; the wreckage of birds I became when he felt me up in the hallway. I didn’t know what to call that feeling, only that I was on the edge of something as impressive and glorious as catastrophe, counting my life mostly as a series of small, terrible stories: elsewhere, children are being beaten in factories; beaten if they don’t speak Japanese; stripped from their bones if they’re born in the wrong country. That year, I fumbled everywhere for some authorized trajectory through my short-legged life.

How can I explain the things and things and things I did wrong? I was never any good at telling the difference between what wanted me and what wanted me gone.

My breath flew up into the branches and caught like a flag.

I didn’t know until I did: He put a new word inside me, which rhymed with the word that was already there.

She is cranking open modernity’s throat, wrenching her arc from its scat.

Every day of my life has been something other than my last. Every day, an extinction misfires, and I put it to work.

I lie on the floor partially bursting, partially stripped by the fact, drowning in the fact, slobbering like a dog in the heat of the fact. Here, on the other side of what happened, I make nothing happen, nothing, nothing, nothing, flaccid as a gerund.

If I call myself unlovable, I am, practically; if I say it enough times: unlovable. Then, like practical magic, I’m hollow as old garlic; I’m distance-skinned.

No one can put a story inside me but me.

I’m a short lie of a woman whom men have wanted to tear apart with their good strong hands. I mean, same.

Unlovable is open-source, anyone can make up new verses to sing it.

O, my badly loved grandmothers, I kin you to me, facelessly. I wrap all our deaths around my shoulders like a fox pelt coat: grandmother across oceans and ages, grandmother across the border, grandmother carried off by soldiers, grandmother carried into endless highway by disease or dog or dawn’s unrelenting purge. I wrap until I’m made of grandmother, until the ritual musk of their dreams is sprouting from my skull: sandalwood, ambergris, copper of blood, coin copper, clay of approaching dusk. I am loved by pheromone if nothing else. By accident at best.

When I walk into the street it’s almost as if it’ll last: smudge of a cooked orange pressed into the sky.

I stalk the house swatting the flies, thirsty for the sound of newspaper on exoskeleton, the satisfaction of a clean and bloody ending. When they’re gone, I almost miss them. They fly out of my arms. I fly out of their arms.

Old story: unequal distribution of grace.

My mother, unmothered, grew death-quick.

Today, I woke up on still-stolen land, then scrolled through the latest debris of people attempting godliness in a hundred wrong ways.

Look: paradise is both a particle and a wave. You don’t have to believe in something for it to startle you awake.

We knew the end was coming here. We knew it, and like idiots—like perfect idiots—we stayed.