write about: "if the world would end on thursday, march 23rd..."

i've been thinking about this a lot, between boxes of old documents, boxes of books and suitcases loaded with clothes, since i got this phone call from my mother. the same old story i've been hearing for 20 years, the sea will rise and wash away the coast. now that i 've moved to this beautiful new apartment... well, i keep having images in my mind of the water coming up to the 5th floor loaded with garbage and cockroaches and swimming rats and getting in through the kitchen, because it's open to the outside. but i won't see that because i'll be at work, in the black tower, and i'll watch everything from the top. maybe i should take my mother's advice and pack and go to her house in the mountains tomorrow. or go to my sister's house in the upland. maybe i could get crazy and eat, drink, smoke, fuck as much as i want because the world will end. maybe i could buy everything i want on credit and spend my last days listening PJ bootlegs i've been saving for, drinking ice vodka and eating chocolate. thinking about it, if the world ended, i wouldn't have to spend money on a wardrobe, wouldn't have to give half my savings to the government as income tax, and wouldn't have to worry about the gas company bothering me and the fact that the winter is coming and i don't have gas at home. i wouldn't have to worry that i'm getting older and that i'll never be loved again. but i'll probably just go on as if thursday was a day like any other. choose to believe in that other medium, the guy who told the american government the location of Saddam Hussein's hideaway (and who is now sueing Washington for the US$25 million reward), at least he said the world will end only in 2012. then i would have time to have my band. my perfect companion would have time to arrive in my life. i could buy the new PJ album and go to a PJ show one more time. but... now i realize, what am i saying? everyday is the end of the world for someone... many days almost were the end of my world, only depending on a step more on the street, by the window sill, one more pill, one fine cut on the wrist. and my world has ended many more times before, at every lie, every disappointment, every injustice, every humilliation, every act of lack of love. it really doesn't matter. whatever.

Great prompt, Dea - I hope some more people are as inspired as I am.

Your piece was beautifully sad - I felt like I was being drawn into your world, floating there watching you relate this, like I was flashing through your thoughts with you. It's a difficult technique to do right, but you've mastered it here.

By using anchors that we all share, the images of the end of the world, of the little things that knit together and give us hassle every day, simple things like putting a roof over our heads and food in our mouths you give us a reference to not only experience this world but make it our own.

Then you bring what you would do in your last days. You balance the negatives from the start of your passage by bringing in all the beautiful things that we have given to us in the world, all the lucky things, mixed in with the hedonism of sex, drugs and rock and roll.

Then you take us to the hypothetical of the world ending in 2012, giving everyone a chance to get everything done, you make us understand the futility of trying to second guess it and bring in the tragedy of it always being someone's last day, and an acceptence that you can't change it.

It doesn't really matter. Whatever. Could be an admission of defeat, but because of the journey you took us on, it's a victory shout.

For these reasons and more, this is the best thing I've ever seen from you.

wow and i thought it was just a bad journal entry, as i told you... tks for the kind review, though you really saw more than there was actually there... i guess that's the magic of words, once they're out, they really don't belong to you anymore. tks again for saving my day, in a way. or at least making it much better.

It had always been so evident, why should anything be different?

if the world were to end
(the tomorrow after tomorrow),
i would spend my final moments
twisted in blankets beside
your ever-warm form.
we'd whisper hot secrets
and gentle i-love-yous
as we waited for the sun to
never ever rise.

sweet... i just wish i had an ever-warm form to twist in blankets beside...

if today was the last, i would listen to that song of comfort, 'death is not the end': i would repent, i'd tell you that i'll never leave you, not now, not when the day is over and the world has ended, not ever.