The End of the World

Here at the end of the world, it is quiet. The alarms have long since died leaving the landscape a silent graveyard of decayed building tombs, but for the occasional sound of distant dogs, who have never learnt to hunt, scrapping in the empty supermarkets.

I forget the noise humans make, till the wind in a drooping tree makes me think of a roaring road, and then feet on the pavement and cars doors slamming. And then conversation. Not witty repartee, informed debate- what’s the use when there’s no-one to hear it?- but the sound of a hundred people, more, talking at once and living their lives in a blur that makes impossible to pick out more than a few words before it is lost.

We talk in the evening, me and him, around the fire. In the old days, we used to imagine we were camping, and tomorrow we would pack up and go back to…before. That began to hurt too much, as we really accepted that this was for life, for ever. I never realised how long a lifetime was before now. We moved on to the past, after that, our lives, our outlooks. We talk less now. Philosophies mean little, when there are only two, and when nothing happens but survival, how can you talk about what sort of day you’ve had?

We’re not in love, him and me, or anything so convenient. But we need each other, the way humans do, company, someone else in all this emptiness. We fuck sometimes, when we’re feeling lonely, and the loneliness goes, replaced by the more acute feeling of actually being alone.

We don’t know we are the last of course. We can’t, for sure. I want to go looking sometimes, take a car, any, there are plenty, and go searching. But he won’t. He knows, he says, he feels it. I could go without him, but then I would be alone. Because I know too, deep down. A part of me has to hope though, or why would I write this?

If a tree falls in a wood, and there is no-one around to hear it, does it make a sound?

If marks on a page tell a story, but there is no-one to understand the marks, does the story exist?

I used to write stories once, but he never read them, so what was the point? They were always better in my head anyway. I still read though. I tried to explain to him, about the writers, all those stories, all those characters that would never live again, without people to read them. He just scoffed. Ironic; if he had asked me out, before, I probably would have replied 'not if you were the last man on earth'.

It is the people I miss though. Not CDs or play stations, not hot water on tap, but people. Without people, nothing means anything. Life is just about surviving, making sure the animal we are has enough food and water and air. I am glad, for this reason, that the fire wood must be found and chopped, the vegetable garden must be tended, that the cow we found wandering through the town centre must be fed.

Why did we survive? Why should it be us, out of the six billion people, that survived everything which came? The importance of the question has faded with time. Survival is relative anyway. We only stayed longer before dying. Ten, twenty, maybe thirty years? What’s that in the history of a planet, a universe? This is no apocalypse. We were a blink, less.

In the end, only humans were driven to extinction. I heard this theory once, one of those hippy things, from the seventies, when the only people who really believed that the planet was in trouble because of man were all wearing knit-wear and hugging trees. Not that knit-wear isn’t useful now. This theory was known as the Gaia Hypothesis. It was this idea that the earth would control conditions to provide the optimum conditions for life, like homeostasis. We made her too hot, so she destroyed us. This emptiness, this quiet desolation, is the just sweat on her skin.

Maybe there’s hope here then. There are animals, insects, bacteria, still. They have survived the end of us, so life will go on. And maybe that’s what I’m looking for. It is fragile, faint, a meagre reward for a lifetime of futility. Why should a dog’s life contain any more meaning than mine? It means nothing, it will be gone, unrecorded, unnoticed and inconsequential in the great scheme of things, swallowed. But it is alive. Humans, or perception, maybe what marks something out as special, but life is different. Something which is alive is apart from something that is not, which is inanimate. It is hope.