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.

Catastrophe Is Next to Godliness 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. The day A died, the sun was brighter than any sun. I answered the phone, and a channel opened between my stupid head and heaven, or what was left of it. The blankness stared back; and I made sound after sound with my blood-wet gullet. O unsayable—O tender and divine unsayable, I knew you then: you line straight to the planet’s calamitous core; you moment moment moment; you intimate abyss I called sister for a good reason. When the Bad Thing happened, I saw every blade. And every year I find out what they’ve done to us, I shed another skin. I get closer to open air, true north. Lord, if I say, Bless the cold water you throw on my face, does that make me a costume party. 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—

Midnight, and my stomachs drag like nets through a river. Dawn, and I’m out on the blacktop, praying to no one, so no one prays back.

I know I should want to be torn open by the failures of hope, but here’s what I want: a tight circle around everyone I love; a stove that doesn’t burn. O year, O shitstorm, it’s impossible to be alive, impossible to be dead. So, brainlessly, I tongue the news again, instead.

It’s so corny to call for the tyrant’s head again, and yet.

No, thank you, I’m stuffed, I couldn’t possibly have more hope. I haven’t finished mourning the last tyrant yet.

Headline: the unthinkable’s already, already happened again—and

As a child, I couldn’t believe my luck: born in the best country on Earth. Now I know better. So what. Good morning, what’s done is done is. Come in, last year’s wreck, rent. Grief’s a heavy planet, and green. I know better than to call each gravity’s daughter to my softest cheek. I know, and I know. So what?

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—

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

Sliced from bone, my life hung like a jaw—faultless. And unforgivable.

Deserve, deserve, what a sad little word.

So yes, I feel most like my grandmother when someone is scraping my name out of me. I feel most like my grandmother’s mother when I’m already gone. When I’m peeled down to my seam. When I lift my skin and smell—nothing. No rot. No story. Not even the emptiness of salt.

I was so afraid of seeing dead people that I saw them everywhere.

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

Here is what is true: he put himself inside after I said we couldn’t. It wasn’t the last time I wanted to slap the light out of me.

I didn’t know until I did: 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 of my life has been something other than my last. Every day, an extinction misfires, and I put it to work.

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.

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 a highway opens between my hearts, and I run suicides till I’m lactic. Sometimes I wonder how long I’d have to run to reach the last generation where one of us felt loved, and I crumple into carcass.

O, I’ve been hard to love in America. I’ve been slow to speak in America. I’ve been, undoubtedly, an American and done practically nothing to stop it.

Among a growing list of promises I can’t make my friends: This weight will tether. You can come back up again. The faithfulness of gravity, of morning sounds. If only you’ll stay.

meanwhile, three teenagers pile rollicking onto the sidewalk. I don’t know how to do it: hold their faces in my hands and tell them what’s waiting. How to teach any of us to follow this song, into what dark.

One evening, I turned a corner and panicked at a sudden flash in my rearview, teeth chattering into my highest throat. Every nerve prepared for the acrid drip of cop talk until I realized: it was no cruiser. It was the sky. The sky, shocked with dying.

I can hold his voice in my hands and whisper straight into it, but that doesn’t make him here. I can love and love his arms helping mine make something other than dirt and watch that love bleed straight into the space between us and then of course. It falls. Into a tunnel and gone.

the world of saying a thing in unison so clear it drills a hole through to the other side of what’s possible, so clear and wholly inverted, we realize it’s been here all along:

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.

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.

bordered on one end by love-as-imprisonment, as husbandry, a price to being touched, a historical and therefore unsurprising cage writhing with tongues. On the other end: grief and its endlessly fabulous outfits; feathers for weeks; tulle. And in the swath between them, loneliness. Just that: loneliness. I thought that was all love could give me. 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.