The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

by Franny Choi

I was born from an apocalypse and have come to tell you what I know—which is that the apocalypse began when Columbus praised God and lowered his anchor.

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.

while humming idly some stupid tune at the sink, I’ll realize for the first time ever what! that line meant (though of course pop everywhere’s a language so reliable it’s nearly nothing, baby let me know and I need you in my arms on babbling loop through the ages), and I’m thinking, too, about how this, my first love of losing myself in the scaffolds and percussives of an unparsed lyric doomed me for life to never be able to hear, actually hear, the words to any songs, even in English, even my favorites, like Jamila’s, which I put on when I’m adrift and sunken and just need to feel at home in something—even those harbors are built, mostly, of sonics— not gibberish, I mean, but language so sacred it’s not my place to try to decipher it, phonemes holy as stones on a string, mysterious as the names we give to animals, or words we know only in prayer—at

Try not to time travel, says the voice in my meditation app, as I fast-forward to everything I haven’t yet remembered to be afraid of—

I’m okay, say the ventriloquized pixels of my mother. I don’t believe her. I’ve skipped too far ahead. A few dozen years, and it won’t be true. A hundred, and I’ll never know I knew.

The problem with using a word like “mourning” in reference to the future. As when a mother in a movie says to her gay son, “You’re dead to me.” She mistakes glow for a grave, but there he is, red constellation of coals. Here’s something I can say about us: we’re not dead, not yet. (Not anymore.)

Q: Is it possible to experience anticipatory feelings toward the past? A: A whole, gaping, pulsing as I run toward it, though it’s the running that pushes it away. In other words, the event is horizonal; an event horizon mothering itself.

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

I wanted to fuck, then shoot the man who spoke to my mother like a child. I was so afraid of seeing dead people that I saw them everywhere. It was the new age. “We” finally had “our own” war. 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.

Somewhere in a world that didn’t quite end, a woman like me is foraging for that which failed to kill her. She is cranking open modernity’s throat, wrenching her arc from its scat. She is a woman who can hack an impossible morning into water, bean paste, bitter leaves, another chance to fumble toward the next chance, and the next— Every day of my life has been something other than my last. Every day, an extinction misfires, and I put it to work.

If a partway bomb; if a half-paused hell; if a killing, failed, can feed; if a death sentence, incomplete; if a horror, flopped; if extinction unlocks its jaw; if what doesn’t kill you makes you; if almost; if never; if the friction of did not succeed; if someone harnessed annihilation in service of a stew; if someone me-like can see disaster’s refuse and think, dinner; if they can gather reeds and soften them with the genius of unconsummated doom; if I can almost love the bomb that didn’t burst; then,

Listen: I have a bad imagination. Dystopia is the word for what’s already happened so many times, it’s the reason ________’s so cheap.

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

In Flint I turn on the tap and out comes war wrapped in putrid cellophane. In Detroit I flip the switch and boil war for tea. In Providence I over-war the plants. War runs down my face in the theater’s dark. I wade into a blanket of war and let its waves carry me out, out past the shoreline’s certainty.

Holding my love’s face in my hands, I tell him I miss him. I say, I miss you like I miss the trees. By this I mean, Look! The trees are here! Everyone’s outside, darling: green in my hands, ghosts in the drywall—everyone’s waiting for us.

I should mention that when my first love died, he was already dead, had already always been on his way to the roof, on his way over its edge. And when he was here, he was here. By this logic, he is and was and is and was. Unrelentingly.

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.

O kingdom of fire, O kingdom of food, with the same mouth we take your blessings; with the same mouth we pronounce you come.

Dear Improbable You, What was it like to live so gridded? So trackchanges? So carceral, somnambulant, asphyxiating at split screens while Nation glowered with rot? What was it like to slouch numb-faced here and watch your image get dirty with Algorithm elsewhere, shuffle into destiny’s schlep? Did your pulse come haptic? Did you pay money for food? Did you dial three numbers and salute genocidaires with crestwhitened incisors when they knocked? Did you pray ever? Hope, any? Or did you take a number, snatch what scraps you could, and pet your children? Everything was happening, and you were alive. You were alive then. What did you do?

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.

Every day, a sky is. Miles are. We sing, entangled, and the root-world answers, and together we’re making. Something of it. Something of all those questions you left.

The minute I started wanting paradise, it leapt from my belief.

I’m like you—still drooling after a perfect world, even as the stars warble off-key and the oceans rattle with plastics. Imagine, I can’t stop saying. Imagine, I beg, when I should have said, 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

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.

For years, I was hot with that siren, sweaty with doomsday’s moans. I lathered my skin in hopelessness. O, it was better that way—to be streaked with the prophecy

I’m sorry. I thought I’d seen the future. I thought I knew the words to our one wild and unfathomable life. Forgive me; I see it now. I wasted so much time being wrong.

It’s okay if you don’t believe me. No one could have told me I was possible with a sentence that would have made it true. So: this isn’t a sentence. It’s a sound. It’s a blade, spinning. It’s a wave that stutters at the air until the plate glass cracks.