I’ve been refreshing the homepage of every major news site for the past twelve hours looking for some sort of a hint about how the world is going to end. I know it’s crazy, I know it’s irrational but I can’t escape the feeling that there’s only a couple days left before everything ceases to exist. I’m not exactly sober right now, so excuse me if I ramble; I just needed to get this out.
For the past four years I worked in a writing room for a children’s TV show. If you’re between the ages of seven and twelve then you might’ve heard of it, if you aren’t, then you haven’t. It wasn’t exactly the most glorious of gigs. When I was younger I imagined I’d be a household name by now, but reality sets in over time.
Four years later, December 2019, we finish off the script for the final season. The writing room dissolves and we all gear up to enter the New Year freshly unemployed. It was all pretty bitter-sweet, I don’t think anyone had a particularly strong connection to the source material and the last couple of weeks dealing with studio notes were pretty tense, but most of us were with the project from the start and it felt weird saying goodbye to something we’ve spent so long working on. I figured I’d look at the bright side and take the ending of the show as a sign that it’s time to move on to something new and exciting. I promised myself I’d write something gory and raunchy come January with the hopes of getting myself past the G-rating mindset.
I took some time off from writing during the Christmas holidays. Figured providing a bit of a buffer zone between projects would do me good and I was spending my first Christmas with the partner’s family so I didn’t want to come off anti-social. Outside of some awkwardness from me refusing wine during Christmas dinner her family was all sorts of Hallmark, nice people, good food, decent potential in-laws. I got her dad a beard trimmer because he has a beard and her mom a book about dogs because she likes dogs. They got me a fancy pen because I’m a writer. As far as inoffensive gifts go, I’d say we did pretty well. I’m not a big Christmas person, the whole gift-giving thing makes me anxious, but my partner managed to provide a gift that floored me.
A couple weeks back my parents sold our first desktop computer to a collector. It was one of those blocky Mackintoshes that had a power button in the back and would casually go ‘yaba-daba-doo’ every hour; a good old grandfather clock with a word-processor built in. Before getting rid of the computer my mother backed up all of the files on a series of floppy discs. For Christmas my partner gave me a stack of them, everything I wrote between ’99-’05; my collection of completed works before we switched over to a computer that could handle colors. I was pretty floored, the idea of reading stuff I wrote when I was twelve filled me with equal parts curiosity and horror. I was expecting a lot of cringe, and a lot of cringe I got, but I also stumbled upon something that’s had me scouring the Internet for evidence of impending doom.
After we came back home I ordered an external floppy disc reader off of Amazon and on January first, while the rest of the world was slugging through their hangovers I started reading through my old work. Reading your old stuff is a trip. On a long enough time-scale you forget what you wrote and you disassociate with the stuff on the page. You become an audience member, someone who is listening to a storyteller who is very similar to you but a different person at the same time.
My partner and me had a spat about something stupid after New Years so I spent most of the first week of January buried in the floppies. Basically all of the stuff from ’05 was about how cruel and unjust love is and how booze is the only thing that makes life worth living. Ah good old teenage angst, I had faint memories of being eighteen and drunkenly staying up in the living room thinking that I’m uncovering some sort of a cruel cosmic truth behind the keyboard. The ’04 stuff was all romance stories where the world conspired to tear two lovers apart, basically a life-affirming prequel to the bitter rambles of the ’05 era. I traveled down memory-lane floppy by floppy as the stories got less biographical and ventured more into the realm of space travel and elves.
I’ve left plenty of projects half-finished over the past couple of years; other stuff would come up, I would lose steam or I just thought that the idea wasn’t worth my time. My younger self, however, stuck by his guns and finished every story. The endings weren’t always super-thought out, some would sail smoothly into a conclusion but most would just abruptly end. A dozen or so plot threads that were left completely dangling, conflicts dissipated into nothingness, invading armies just randomly decided to go home, unsatisfying endings, but endings nonetheless.
I was reaching the end of the stack and the stories were becoming increasingly hard to read. Space pirates here, space pirates there, evil magicians and all that other noise that a twelve year old would come up with. My partner was meant to leave for a business trip the next week so we had ourselves a little peace-treaty dinner. Neither of us remembered what the original fight was about and both of us were hungry. By the end of the meal we were friends again. Gotta love long-term relationships.
We came back home, had our first bang of the year and then she passed out. I wasn’t feeling like sleeping yet so I snuck over to my computer for one last bedtime story. If I would’ve stayed in bed, I wouldn’t be writing this right now. Instead I went over to the living room a picked out a floppy labeled ‘The Novel’.
Like most fledgling pen-monkeys my first attempt at writing anything was a novel. There was no pre-planning, there was no set ending, my twelve year old self just started weaving an unstructured story about another twelve year old with hopes of a plot emerging on its own. I didn’t remember writing the thing at all, but what I do remember is the reactions when I sent around the first couple of chapters. My friends said it made them sad, my English teacher recommended me to the school councilor, my father awkwardly sat on the edge of my bed asking me if I’ve ever done drugs. After the first couple of chapters I had to take a walk around the room, the cringe was strong with this one.
The novel dealt with the story of Mark, a character who was totally not based on twelve year old me because he had different colored hair. He would stroll around town being sad and moody while witnessing people being cruel to each other. Cops constantly shot innocent people, every homeless person was getting spit at, half the population was drunk because they couldn’t cope with how unfair life was. I can’t believe I actually showed the first couple of chapters to people, I’m happy that at some point I stopped showing off my work and kept the narrative to myself.
It was pretty entertaining seeing a funhouse-mirror version of my twelve-year-old life. The first experience I’ve had with a cigarette was with Jerry Stone, we snuck out of school during lunch and each smoked half a Lucky Strike. In the novel Mark had his first smoke with the aptly named James Tree and instead of coughing his lungs out and putting the cigarette out halfway through he instead smoked like a seasoned veteran and mused about the painful nature of life. I’ve been on the vapes for the past two years, but reading “Smoking is the only socially acceptable form of suicide. That’s why so many people smoke. It’s because they want to die,” made laugh so hard I needed a cigarette. I snuck over to my partner’s purse and bummed one of those pop-menthol smokes.
I kept on reading and Mark kept on getting older. He stumbled through life making and losing friends while going through all sorts of pretentious monologues about how cruel and unpredictable life is. It honestly was starting to get a bit monotone; there’s only so many ways you can explore human capacity for selfishness. I figured I’d give it a couple more chapters before going back to bed, but then the sex stuff came. I lit up another one of my partner’s smokes.
Now I don’t want to get too blue, I am talking about the writing of a pre-pubescent here, but Jesus Christ. Whatever guesses my twelve-year-old-self had about high-school hook ups were way off base. Every tryst was loaded with drama, romantic triangles were everywhere, any teacher below forty was banging a student and every time people had sex they would get off like twelve times a pop. Thank fucking god I never sent this to anyone else, pretty sure if my parents read this they would have me sent to a shrink and have the school investigated. My early romances were purely limited to doing hand stuff at parties while being terrified. I’m certain none of our teachers banged any of the students and the amount of romantic triangles were pretty sparse throughout my school life. The chapters were frantic, anatomically questionable and just generally off base in terms of human sexuality. Just the type of thing you’d expect from a twelve-year-old writing about what he thinks high school is like. I read through a handful of gross sex-talk and then I ran across something that gave me pause.
Mark met a girl with a gap in her teeth. Up until this point everything followed a pretty predictable path; angst, a little bit of booze, more angst and then some misguided attempts at romance. The story applied to me, but if my twelve-year-old self would have watched enough teen movies he could have made a handful of educated guesses that would hit near the mark. But the girl with the gap in her teeth was unsettling. That was something real. I read on as twelve-year-old me waxed poetic about my senior year girlfriend. He wasn’t completely accurate, there were differences in hair color and other cosmetic bullshit, but it was her.
I smoked the rest of the pack as I read about how Mark and me fell in love with Jen, she was Joanne in the book but it was definitely Jen. The plot started to drag, all conflict disappeared and Mark and Joanne strolled through a perfect world where people would compliment the beautiful couple every chance they would get. Thirty pages into a perfect romance I realized it was four in the morning. This was all weird, really weird, but I promised myself I’d go to sleep at adult times in 2020. I snuck into bed at around four ten.
Four twelve our neighbors came home drunk. They were seemingly in a good mood because they came home singing. They then proceeded to continue their signing to the backing of an out of tune guitar. My partner woke up and got all sorts of pissed, she yelled about calling the cops but nothing came of it. I passed out.
I woke up at eight again; she was in a bad mood. The living room smelled like an ashtray and her cigarettes were gone. If I was more lucid I would have explained myself but by the time I understood what she was complaining about she was already out of the door. I felt bad about taking her stuff and I went back to sleep.
I woke up late in the afternoon; as soon as I properly woke up I went straight for the computer and started reading again. The perfect relationship lasted for about twenty more pages and then Mark’s best friend died.
It came out of nowhere. The character wasn’t based on anyone I knew and didn’t appear earlier in the novel. One of the chapters just started up with Mark at his ‘best friend’s funeral’. I was confused, for a second I started to wonder whether my twelve-year-old self wasn’t just really good at guessing the whole gap-in-the-teeth thing, but then Mark got a text message. Joanna broke up with him. Jen broke up with me after we put down the family dog. The novel wasn’t accurate in fact, but the spirit of the situation was all there. Twelve-year-old me predicted my high-school break-up. He also predicted the anger.
I’ve been to therapy. I’ve talked about it. I’ve spent a good chunk of my adult life looking in that particular mirror, but reading those pages made my blood cold. A great injustice happened to Mark, his perfect love was torn apart and no one could understand his pain. He had people in his life that were concerned for him, they wanted to talk it out, but whenever Mark told them about how his one true chance at love was over they’d bring up some dumb high-school crush they had when they were his age. No one understood. It wasn’t like you could just go ‘ah well, the past is the past’ and get over it. The memories lingered. The thoughts of Joanna with someone else kept him up at night. He needed to get rid of that image. So he drank.
My partner keeps a bottle of wine in the apartment. She’s checked with me a thousand times and I keep on telling her its fine. It’s good to have something to offer up to guests and sometimes she just likes to have a glass after a rough day at work. I don’t want my issues to become her issues. I’m not that kind of alcoholic. But reading those pages. Fuck. I haven’t craved a drink so bad in five years. Mark drank because he wanted something to take his mind off his shattered love, I wanted to drink because I wanted something to take my mind off of Mark.
I started skimming through chapters. I don’t know how twelve-year-old me predicted the ‘drunk’ chapter of my life but the last thing I wanted to do was to go through it twice. I wanted to find out what happens next, not to Mark, but to me.
Mark drank some more. Mark made mistakes. Mark hit rock bottom. Mark moved back in with his parents. Mark readjusted his expectations. Mark got super into self-help books. Mark went through a flurry of unsatisfying relationships. Mark started to go bald. Mark sent in an application to a children’s television program. I got light-headed. My heart felt weird. I had to remind myself to breathe. I laid down on the couch fearing a heart attack. That’s when she came home.
I really love her. Like, I would marry this person. I’m still pretty pissed about how everything turned out though.
She comes in complaining about how her accommodation for the training trip got messed up and how she’ll have to get on a plane with three hours of sleep. I tell her about the novel, about the predictions and how I’ve never been more terrified in my life. You know what she says? “Oh, that’s weird. I wonder how the book ends.” Then she pours herself a fucking glass of wine and complains about her job like I didn’t just fucking tell her I found a book that predicted my entire fucking life.
So we argue, the neighbors bang on the wall, she grabs her things and leaves for the airport two hours early. The bottle of white remained on the counter. I’m honestly surprised that I didn’t touch it then. Instead, like a goddamn grade schooler, I took a deep breath and counted to ten. God bless self-help books. I corked the wine and put it back in the fridge.
I desperately wanted to get to the ending of the book but I also understood I messed up. Took some deep breaths on the couch, meditated a bit and then I texted her. She texted back. We both did that three-point apology thing that we promised the therapist we would do and after a couple texts we were good as new. She acknowledged that the book thing was freaky. I acknowledged that her boss is an asshole. We both agreed to call the cops the next time the neighbors keep us up at night and then we just talked. I don’t remember what we chatted about, but it calmed me down, I stopped thinking about the book. The whole thing was a weird coincidence; a strange, lonely, tween’s attempt to guess the future that turned out to be partially correct. She got on her plane and I promised to tell her how the book ends after she lands. I still haven’t told her. That’s why I’m here.
After she got on the plane I spent a bit more time lying on the couch trying to come up with plausible explanations as to how twelve-year-old me wrote the book. Nothing noteworthy arose, so I just figured I would rip the Band-Aid off. I went to the computer and just scrolled through to the last page.
I read the ending. It didn’t make sense. I needed more context. I scrolled back ten pages and found Mark reading the book. He finds it funny at first, then sentimental, then scary. His girlfriend comes back, they fight, she leaves, they apologize by text after they cool off. He reads the ending and it’s dumb, he texts her about it and she texts him about an annoying baby after her plane lands. The two text each other non-stop for the next two days, he sends her dirty texts, she sends him dirty pictures. She comes back home; they make love and fall asleep in each other’s arms, recommitted to the relationship. Then the world ends.
No explanation. No warning. No closure. Mark and his girlfriend just cuddle up, say their ‘I love you’s and then the world ends.
I have a handful of missed calls from her, all starting with a text about a crying baby on a plane. The bottle of wine is empty and I’m feeling buzzed. I don’t know what to do.
I keep on refreshing news sites, looking for something that could end the world out of nowhere in two days. It seems like World War Three is around the corner. I’m scared that if I talk to her she’ll convince me everything is okay. I’m scared that she’ll come home and everything is going to be fine. I’m scared we’ll fall asleep together. I’m scared the world will end.