#doomprep

it's difficult to imagine the end of the world, even as the hours pass her by in endless turnovers. the earth still spins. the sun continues to rise and set. things like hunger and sleeping remain commodities that cannot be spared. she thinks about long walks in the middle of the night and hanging out the passenger window of a camper van just to feel the wind in her hair whilst she hollers something seemingly meaningless at the time about freedom. only now can she realize she never knew a damn thing about what it meant to not live within its luxury. too hungry for the very thing she'd always had. a misshapen version that wasn't ever good enough, but the floorboards beside her bed are worn in from begging in the middle of the night to have back. because begging is exactly what charlie is doing. she wouldn't even call it praying anymore. it feels like too simple of a word for her outpouring of prophetic changes only the moon gets to bare witness to.

“ i know we're supposed to be grateful that we have this place— ” charlie ponders aloud, as if there's nobody for miles and miles. sometimes it's nice.. to pretend there isn't anybody not because there can't be but because they don't want to be. because they got to escape this place. yet, she forgets to pay respect to the fact that she didn't really have anywhere else to escape to. the world too big and her pockets too small. a taste for adventure that a pocket could never hold at all. “ and i am. ” & she is. the way the words hang from her lips say all she needs to say without saying it at all: luck be the noose that hangs thee.

she strokes the fire once, twice, and follows through once again. “ but don't you just wish we could sit up on these mountains and watch the sunset one more time without, i don't know, fearing for our lives? just one more time. ”

a thready laugh meets the air.

your heart beats inside the hollow auditorium of your chest like a nervous hummingbird;   it skips a beat and hair stands on end despite the warmth coursing through your veins.    there is an endurance to your faith,   similar in the way to your heart,   that without it:   you think you would cease to exist.    every spring that brought flowers to every fall that left the trees bare,   the cyclical seasons pass,   as did your fleeting moments on non-belief,   thirst for knowledge greater quenched by each new chapter,    paper thin cuts lined your pointer,   thumb wet with ink in pages flicked too quickly.    [some rushed through to simply be done,   you to reach the next chapter,   to coat yourself with an armour you could understand,  shrouded in text that gave meaning to the world].   even in the end of the world,  it was your crutch,     that there was some meaning to this apocalypse,   that bloody knees and scorched palms could not fix.  the punishment of mankind was never meant to be fair,   let the earth flood and the forests burn so that they must stare their own creation in the face,   to witness the horrors they made.     mankind was to be made in God’s own image,   so were you both not now walking hand in hand;   accepting of the death of civilisation caused by your own lack of discipline?

the wind whispers through the desolate landscape, carrying the stench of decay & echoes of a once-civilized world. squinting against the sunlight, troy's weathered face reflecting the toll of a world gone mad. (a man gone mad.) his piercing blue eyes lock onto his brother as the words breach the air. “you were always the optimist,” he retorts, a cynical half-smile playing across his lips. shifting the weight of his rifle slung across his shoulder, the cold metal a familiar comfort in this new reality, troy can't help but scoff. “what's your verision of the right thing, huh? saving people won't last a week out here? fighting for a world that's long gone? face it, jake— we're the lucky ones. we adapt, we survive, & we don't fucking look back.”