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.

Another episode of the present tense, and I can’t stop thinking about the time line where the asteroid misses, Earth ruled eternally by the car-hearted and walnut-brained. Meanwhile, I’m merely gorging on the butterfly effects of ashes, ashes; reaching for the oat milk

I muttered curses to keep the deep fakes away, studied the stars for signs of the worlds to come, though they were already here—the extinctions and feudal lords, the dirty blankets, the dissidents tied to stakes or hung from branches, the price gouge, death camp, flood, bombs of liberty, bomb and bomb and bomb already dropped, already having made me from its dust, already broken and paid for and straddling my crown. What crown? If I’m king of anything, it’s being late. Omw, I type, though I’m still huddled in last year’s mistakes. Asteroid, Alexa corrects, and I say, Five minutes. Just give me five minutes. I’ll be right there.

O year, O shitstorm, it’s impossible to be alive, impossible to be dead.

If I write, there’s nothing to be done, it’s a bird in the hand, i.e., worth its weight in dead bird. It’s so corny to call for the tyrant’s head again, and yet.

Come in, I whisper to the wailing in the attic, Come in to the thunder, to any sound that’ll shake me from doom’s haze.

As a child, I couldn’t believe my luck: born in the best country on Earth. Now I know better.

Grief’s a heavy planet,

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

and the perfect thunder of it lifted one part of me higher than air, while rooting another deep into the fragrant earth, a bit of which I later scooped, as gently as I could bear, onto the casket, the shovel heavier than any word I knew, and more full of light than even the birds overhead, who, as we wept, kept, of course, right on saying exactly whatever they needed to say.

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

Once, I looked back and purchased vowel after vowel. I devoured the minutes which had already been dripping from my teeth. I smashed the fruit against the bowl and called it “salvage.” I retraced my steps, then retraced the retracing. What could I have done? I’ll say it every night before the day slips into rot: What could I have done?

how to speak to any one in a history like this. how to tell you. everything will be all right. without inheriting. the family business.

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

consider the way a horror like that might burrow into the stuff of a people, not just its genes, but its jokes, the shapes of its crosswalks, the lines of its art.

Names, like ghosts, reverberate.

I was never any good at telling the difference between what wanted me and what wanted me gone.

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

Dystopia is the word for what’s already happened

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.

Once upon a time, the people whose nightmares I inherited were safe; then, they weren’t.

I’m distance-skinned. No one can put a story inside me but me.

If not even my memories love me enough to stay, then fine, cut off the hands that keep me married to any history.

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

When the Pyrex burst all over the stove, we stood still for a minute to let ourselves be rocked by the sound, the sudden natural disaster of our ruined dinner. To be safe, we turned to the ceiling and asked any spirits present to tuck themselves back into the drywall. Then went for bags and brooms, picked out the shards, the ghost-knives hiding in the tiles for our heels.

In America, there were no greater protections from police than wealth and whiteness.

To be loved without reason is the dreamsong of grace.

Every day, she is healing. Mends hurts, scribbles answers.

and if I ask my heart, rude translator though it is, to read back this sound, what I hear rippling from the quiet floor of my chest is let me in let me in, or open it, open it, and now in my chest’s vocabulary there is also a door. There is also a blue light in the top window and a face that will not appear.

They are spells, the women I know, and today, a woman sat in front of a panel of men who, I have to try to believe, were too once boys who shivered in the yard, a woman sat and had to say again and again, it happened, it happened, and watch the glass panes of the once- boys’ faces remain unlit and only echoing back, with their short vocabularies, are you sure, are you sure, are you sure. So tonight, reaching up to hold hands with these leaves stretching onto the back steps, I say: Please. Let this spell grow legs. Let my sisters’ names grow long as their hair. Long as they need to. Let their names rattle the night air with their incessant lungs. Let the sounds of their names burn blue in the night, let even their ugliest memories be named after the daughters of prophets, please, if there is a god named for the humble undersides of these leaves somehow not yet dead, let the names of my sisters make all the doors on my street fly open. Let every tree sleeping in our chests claw awake. And rush out to answer that call.

whose faces are as foreign to each other as the faces of the dead;

There are twelve different siren patterns, one for each kind of crisis: two honks for fire; three short trills for a runaway brain;

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.

Dear Great-Great-Grandsomeone, 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 plentituding what I can; what I can’t, I let tunnel me like roughage, like a “bullet,” like a slur I won’t daycare. What you gave me isn’t wisdom, and I have no wisdom in return, just handfuls of lifestock: 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.

Only the trees who died for my handwriting,

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

I’m not good enough to survive not being good.

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