The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

by Franny Choi

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.

I have last year’s ashes in my throat, stories stuffed so full of morals they bleed sugar.

I’m stuffed, I couldn’t possibly have more hope. I haven’t finished mourning the last tyrant yet.

I keep dreaming about showing up late to my own funeral, everyone tapping their feet as I climb into the casket—

This sense of impending catastrophe is an illusion, however, because the trauma never quite arrives. It never arrives because it has already happened. —Grace M. Cho

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.

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.

He put a new word inside me, which rhymed with the word that was already there.

Someday we’ll lie in dirt. With mouths and mushrooms, the earth will accept our apology.

Every day, an extinction misfires, and I put it to work.

Sometimes I wonder how long I’d have to run to reach the last generation where one of us felt loved,

ask a friend to bind me with rope until I can’t move, tense up until I cry; then laugh until the ties loosen; until everything loosens;

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

You’ve dreamt about it since you were a kid: a secret, a funeral, a spreading cough, and then it starts—the end. The whole, terrible end. For years, you’ve kept one eye on the shadows swilling above the door, waiting for the arrival of the God of Doom. What to do now that he’s here, sipping coffee in our kitchen? We sneak glares from the sink, mutter apologies when we bump in the hall. He’s an awful guest, of course—tracks blood everywhere, cries when we feed him, screams if we don’t. So we keep the freezer stocked with dumplings, black fruit, beans to last a month. We take turns hefting his bulk, keep him placated with a soundtrack of pickaxes, songs about death camps and microplastics, circular fretting, it’s only a matter of time. When it storms, he yanks open the windows; he polishes our worst parts; steals, constantly. At night, he raps at the wall behind our heads, just as he did for ten thousand nights before he showed up, just as he’ll do for ten thousand nights after. Meanwhile—well, you know. Meanwhile. All our kin is dying at a distance. The coast’s been burning for weeks. Filling the kettle, you catch me humming, The dream that you dream will come true, and we laugh, though nothing’s funny but this: We knew the end was coming here. We knew it, and like idiots—like perfect idiots—we stayed.