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.

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

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

Dystopia of houseless people and boarded-up houses on the same city block;

Dystopia of hold music;

Dystopia of platitudes;

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—

They’ll say: What was it like to have so many people on Earth at once? They won’t say that, but I’ll answer anyway: It was very busy. There was always something to avoid.

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

Before, I was sweet enough to be let into rooms. Then I was a red flash among the trees.

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

Every day of my life has been something other than my last. 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,

When disaster comes, some of us will stand on the rooftop to address the ghosts. Some of us will hold the line. Some will look for the shards, run our tongues along the floor. : : : I say when like disaster hasn’t come, isn’t already growing in the yard.

I dream of things that are larger than life I can walk the streets at any time of the day am I the colonization or the reparations?

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.

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

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

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

Just that: loneliness. I thought that was all love could give me. I’m sorry. I thought I’d seen the future.