The End of the World

Again, I thought of it merely as a terrible occurrence. Nothing unordinary. But the world around me began to become extremely unordinary. Violence in the streets. Ignorance running rampant. Hate tearing apart friends and family. And that’s when the deaths came at an alarming pace. All great minds, great souls, people who touched the people around them. Whether it was a beloved friend or a great man who changed the world, they all began to pass. Illness. Accidents. All ordinary reasons a person could die, but all happening one after another, taking them away from the world. 

And yet the world raged on. Illness spread like wildfire. And then wildfire spread, scorching the earth. The seas shook and destroyed all in its path. The earth ripped open and swallowed whole cities. And yet we couldn’t see, not even then.

As the sky was blotted out in a plume of ash, as humans raged and killed each other, as the earth itself sought to wipe humanity from its surface as the virus we were, we couldn’t tell that the best of us were the ones to die. They were pulled away from us, one by one, and we never saw it for what it was.

When the books of old named The Rapture, we thought we would know it when it came. We thought souls would be pulled into heaven by some heavenly light. Or perhaps they would all die at once, thus alerting us to what was upon us. Never in our wildest dreams did we think their deaths would come in their own time, pulling them away from the madness. But we finally realized it as the year came to a close. As the last true soul was taken from us and we all sat amidst our dying planet, we knew. We knew that the rapture had snuck in on us. We were left here, amidst the chaos and the pain and the living death. 

Satan himself had come amongst us, to torture us and pull us apart. We crowned him king. He named himself true and we named him god. It was then that I knew. It was then we all knew. Hell had come home. Hell had come and we had welcomed it. It had crept into our homes and we had opened our doors to it. It had slid into our beds and we would lie with it. We had turned our eyes from the truth and now we must live in what we wrought.

We had always thought we would know the end of the world when it came. But when it came, we only knew once we were already in hell.