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.

Am I greedy for comfort if I ask you not to kill my friends—if I beg you to press your heel against my throat—please, not enough to ruin me, but just so—just so I can almost see your face—

Somewhere in a prior world, a woman with my face is scraping the seeds from an unborn hell. All night, doom rang from the sky. And in the morning, there are mouths to feed.

Somewhere in a world that didn’t quite end, a woman like me is foraging for that which failed to kill her.

in lieu of all I can’t do or undo; I hold. The faces of the trees in my hands. I miss them. And miss and miss them. Until I fly out of grief’s arms, and the sky. Catches me in its thousand orange hands. It catches me, and I stay there. Suspended against the unrelenting orange. I stay there splayed, and dying. And shocking the siren sky.

Land that won’t love us back, of thee, of thee. To be loved without reason is the dreamsong of grace.

In the demilitarized record hall, I hand over a slip of demilitarized paper, and the clerk smiles at my accent. You’ve traveled a long way, she says as she leads me to the demilitarized stacks. We find my family’s genealogy book. We turn to the last generation recorded before the world ended and our line split south. I unfold my paper with the list of missing names. The clerk copies the letters as I read them. Together, we demilitarize my family. The sun coming in through the windows says, ah. ah.

What I want you to know is that we’re okay. Hurting but okay. We’re surviving, though it’s true, we don’t know what that means, exactly.

Under a graphless sky, I’m writing to say: thank you for healing what you could; for passing down what you couldn’t.

I’m not good enough to survive not being good. I’m like you—still drooling after a perfect world, even as the stars warble off-key and the oceans rattle with plastics.

I imagine decades with your head between my palms and feel only terror at the loss—I’m