ACROSS THE WAY: Apartments with their lights on.

The finale is in an hour, if you believe the Mayans predicted the end. Or whether they just ran out of paper. Perhaps they couldn’t be bothered writing anymore. Eternity is such a long time.

I’m on my balcony and I’m looking across at the opposite apartment building. Neil Young is singing that a man feels afraid and he coos just for me to hear. There’s an apartment across the way, six storeys up where a person jumped from last weekend. It’s the same height as me. A long way up. Lots of the balconies over there have flickering lights and people wander back and forth past windows. But that apartment, six storeys up, is dark.

I looked down at the body lying in the dint it left. Lying there as people emerged from their apartments to examine the sound. I thought a weight had landed on my own roof. But a weight had landed elsewhere. Perhaps a weight was lifted. A person climbed their railing and fell. A person made that decision. They repaired the roof the next morning and that mark was gone. A new sheet of metal replaced that shape the person made. Now there’s an apartment in darkness. An empty bed. Soon someone else will move in. But the story will be repeated, told to people as I did. Speaking it out loud to see if it made sense.

The world is supposed to end in less than hour and despite our blind confidence, beyond the fun of people as they wander up the street, finding their place to drink, I’m sitting here listening to Neil and drinking beer, wondering what the show might look like. Wondering how it’s going to happen.

I think on what kind of dint I’ve left in 29 years and how quickly it would be replaced with a new sheet of metal. I worry that I only write to leave that deep hole. Is it bad to only write creatively to be remembered? What reason should I have? Do I write only to figure out a world that will never be explained? It’s to swim an ocean with no land. It’s to float and watch the sun rise and fall, knowing that one day it won’t rise at all. It’s to stand on an edge and be brave and to choose when to fall. Who will look over at the place I live and see only darkness? Why are we built to ask questions that will never be answered? What is left when you accept that there are no answers? How do you make sense of something that makes no sense at all?

I think I can live in the moment and give in to the feeling of wanting to write something. I can close my eyes and type out words. But it would be so much fuckin’ easier if I knew why.

Until then I’ll just sit here and wait for the world to end. It’s what I was going to do anyway.