“birth at the end of the world”
“My fascination with the end of the world is not new. Most likely, it stems from an early girlhood obsession with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which, at the age of twenty-five, I chose to immortalize by having the letter B tattooed on my right flank after downing a bottle of red wine. (No regrets, by the way.)”
Excerpt of birth at the end of the world
An apocalypse is defined as destruction on a catastrophic scale, or even the total annihilation of the world. The word is derived from the Greek words apo- (un-) and kaluptein (to cover). Together, they mean to uncover, or reveal. When there is nothing left, when all has been undone, what remains? This is what interests me about apocalyptic stories. Most tend to fall into the former catastrophic destruction definition—grave damage to societies without final obliteration. They are post-apocalyptic, meaning they begin during, or just after the end. These new worlds are often devoid of any organizing systems or advanced technology. They are dangerous places, without the structure we’ve spent thousands of years anxiously building to protect ourselves against the natural world and its many uncertainties. Food must be found. Safety must be secured against viruses, zombies, the cold, or other survivors. A post-apocalyptic world seems to quintessentially embody powerlessness.
Just as I’ve had no choice in my displacement due to the fire, these characters, too, must simply submit to the chaos.
Years ago, I wrote a post-apocalyptic story called “The Polluted,” about a man who believes that the propagation of the human race should be staunched. To a small group of followers, he preaches that people are stains on the Earth and that overpopulation is the reason for climate change and their misery. The only way to heal the planet is to rid it of the thing that has made it sick. But one of his followers is sixteen years old. She falls in love.
It’s a story that I’ve been returning to lately, in part because I feel I could have better executed it, and in part because these questions, of morality and procreation, still fascinate me. I want to go back to it, expand this universe, but since the fire, it’s become harder for me to write. Mostly, I avoid writing. What fiction asks of the writer is for them to make choices, over and over again. Each sentence offers a thousand forked roads. My mind races. To pick one road demands a willingness to just let the others go, to stop looking back, and to give up control, with the hope that something good will come of surrendering. But I can’t seem to do that right now. Too many things could go wrong.∞