Thoughts on the End of the World is Bigger Than Love

So I was asked/allowed to read at a bookstore in Tempe last week. I was riding a high of positive social interaction, so I was like, "SURE. I CAN DO THAT." Even though I had absolutely nothing prepared and had to go by the seat of my pants.

But this is something I've wanted to do for some time (probably the past two years) and it finally happened! And it was awesome. The other writers were all great - they all ran the gamut of the somber and the heartbreaking  to genuinely outlandish. The amount of laughter and good feedback I received was so encouraging. I'm honestly hoping to do more of these in the future.

So the theme of the evening was "The End of the World is Bigger Than Love," which is a song by Swedish pop singer Jens Lekman. Awesome, adorable song; major shout-out to the Target in Brooklyn I could never seem to find when I lived there.

It's kind of interesting that a lot of the pieces read last night touched on similar themes. Maybe it's some sort of Jungian archetype we all had concerning "the end of the world." Who knows, but I was a bit awed by it all.

So I adore Jens Lekman and we were penpals briefly in college. As in, I asked him for advice on European girls. No joke. I was quite smitten at this time in my life. Oh, the powers of online dating.

This all being said, here is my piece. "Kill your darlings" is a concept I'm not super comfortable with, but it's pretty essential to genuine confessionalist-type nonfiction.

I hope you enjoy it! And I hope to do more of these things soon. :)

 

Growing up fervently religious in blue-collar, Rust Belt Pennsylvania, there were a few truths to my prepubescent life I held to be certain:

1.)    We were all bad people from the day we emerged from the womb.

2.)    Jesus would return at any moment, you just didn’t know when NOR did you – and the Bible or the priests that recited the Bible to me during endless afternoon masses assured me of this – nor did you have the ability to even guess that time.

3.)    People who called “pop” “soda” were outsiders and should be treated as such.

I believed the world would end at any moment, although I knew CAVEAT EMPTOR on trying to
Miss Cleo that shit. I regularly would wake up in the middle of the night to some indescribable noise, arguably animals or car collisions or drunk people.

                “Must be the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” I would lazily think before rolling back on my other side, and thus, to sleep.

                The end of the world was a very real concept I wrestled with as a child. To me, it was a never a matter of if. It was always a matter of when. I sometimes would look upon Middle Ages-era artwork in school. You know, with the cherubs and the demons and the naked people scattered about, looks of terror tightening their fruit-like faces. Everyone in these paintings is almost always white and basically naked. Apparently everybody else remained on Earth. With clothes. Probably from The Gap.

                I looked upon these paintings like scenes from future crimes, predictions of a grim tomorrow that would eventually materialize.

Eventually.

                The world has ended several times in my decidedly post-Catholic life, since the spiritual crises of my early youth. The first time the world came to a halt was at the turn of the last century. I believed in Y2K, and somehow convinced my mom to stock up on amenities (e.g., water, toilet paper, and People magazine).

                “Moooooooooom!” I moaned in the nascent voice I had that hasn’t changed since puberty. “It’s going to end, AND WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE! MOM!”

                Y2K came and absolutely nothing fucking happened, but we had a surplus of bottled water for the next five years.

                The next time I thought the world would end when I was fired from McDonald’s at the age of 17. They gave me the reason of, and I quote exactly from my somewhat fuzzy memory, “stealing a bag of French fries.” Even as a borderline more rational adult, that explanation seems unlikely. Perhaps I was too flustered at the cash registers to keep up with the constant pace of old people who spat at me their orders from behind plastic teeth and young people who thought I was, to borrow from Elvis Costello, “less than zero.”

                I had written my “Dear John” letter in physics class and tucked it carefully into the pocket of my bleach-colored polo. I had rehearsed what I would say when handing the folded piece of notebook paper to my manager, a grown woman adorned with a bowl cut.

                But, instead. I was the Dear John.

                “We’re going to have to let you go,” my manager told me with a yawn, probably contemplating the cigarette she would take after throwing my ass to the curb. “We have a missing bag of French fries?”

                Really?

                Of course I bawled in the McDonald’s. I wore my hand-me-down sunglasses to the bank when I cashed my last paycheck immediately afterward – in the dead of a sunless Lake Erie winter, mind you – so the bank teller wouldn’t see my tears streaming down my rotund cheeks.

                “What happened?” the bank teller asked my Mom. My Mom mouthed the word “FIRED” to her.

                “Ohhhhhhhh.”

                I spent weeks in a post-apocalyptic haze. I know it was a haze because here I am, a decade later, unconscious of any of it.

But, I climbed out of it. I pulled my way out of the wreck. The world had not ended. Not yet, at least.

                Flash forward several years, I was dating a girl who took me to Applebee’s on a regular basis. We split that deal of a meal they have – you might know what I’m speaking about, two entrees for $20. We were both borderline broke in Arizona, and to us, it made perfect economic sense. But not from a culinary sense.

                I really loved this girl. She threw up in my lap the night I met her, but this did not dissuade me from my pursuit of her. We did everything a completely normal homosexual couple does together, like buy guinea pigs and argue in IKEA.

                At this stage in my life, I defined my perfect relationship as one with a girl who would spend her weekends at Whole Foods with me. I offer no defense. To explain to you where I am coming from as a person, I thought Chili’s was an upscale restaurant until I was 22 and actually ate there. I had diarrhea within 24 hours of that experience.

                Getting back on point, love sometimes blinds us. Love or infatuation, whichever you prefer. My college friend told me on g-chat one afternoon, “Britt, I think you’re in an emotionally abusive relationship.” To which I responded something like, “MEEEEEE? No, NEVER. She’s SO GOOD FOR ME.” In my mind, we were already married and scoping out our next home. I had never imagined myself being loved by anyone who wasn’t bound to me by blood.

                The autumn of that year, my Dad died after a decade-long battle with a miserably failing body. I said my goodbyes via phone while at work one day. I had to excuse myself to the parking lot, because my surrounding co-workers were loudly lost in idle banter. My friend found me in the parking lot walking in circles, and held me in his arms while I tried to process what was happening.

                I went home for the funeral, and when I came back, my girlfriend told me I was poisonous, that she didn’t like how physical I was, and that she never wanted to see me again.

                The world once again ended. I hadn’t thought it was capable of repeating itself, but at that time, I wasn’t particularly anticipating hearing the Four Horsemen thumping down the pavement.

                If I had an inkling of things to come, I wouldn’t have bought those extra guinea pigs with her or let her decorate my apartment with the trinkets she had bought that I never totally wanted. I would have done things differently. As in, “BYEEEEEE FELICIA!” once her warm vomit hit my new Levis.

                I climbed out of the Armageddon once again, though. Fought my way out, limb by tired limb. I learned to be a human again in a world populated by beings I did not know.

                These days, things are different. But a good different, not in the polite way relatives discuss your art-happy cousin (“She’s soooo different.”) Or not in the way people react to you having multiple rodents (“That’s, uh, different.”)

                But I live with the strange awareness that the world could still end. After all, Jesus never told us its precise date or time.

                ADDENDUM: Jesus never said anything about the appropriate term for “soda” in The Bible. The Second Vatican Council has deemed it “sodapop.”