Than the End of the World

You press “= ” and the answer trails off the screen. You chew the eraser stub in annoyance, wondering where you could’ve gone wrong, before scrawling down x=5.683, then bunching up the whole paper and throwing it in the trash. You wonder why you even bother.

Perhaps you’re just clinging desperately to any semblances of normalcy.

It’s Tuesday. Or Wednesday. You’ve lost track because its spring break and the world is ending anyway. The only relevant time is three o’clock, which is when the finale of Kingston airs. As you eye the clock, everything that matters goes into that sheepskin satchel from the Romanian flea market: your phone, your earphones, a mangled copy of Mrs. Dalloway, and twelve cookies (ten chocolate chips between the two of you and two extra peanut butters for him). Though it’s 70 degrees out, you throw on your red windbreaker before hopping on the bike.

It had been raining less than an hour ago. You ride past crystalline birches and cut through rainbows swimming lazily in the shallow puddles. The sun kisses your face, making you blush a little. Somewhere within the bushes, under the guitar riff of California Dreamin’, a robin whistles.

There’s a faint shadow on the turquoise hills behind the houses, a comet or a missile or whatever they said. You ignore that and turn your mind towards the finale.

Ollie buys into the theory about Martha, the detective’s beloved, posing as Q the whole time. But that’s totally bull. I mean, you said, she was clearly killed by the Nazis from the episode three flashback, she’s as dead as your leg after an hour-long bathroom session and it wouldn’t make any sense physically or thematically otherwise. Ollie said why does everything have to be depressing, and you tried to explain the artistic weight of disconsolation as compared to closure. He groaned and said you suck and jumped into lava so you’d have to start over for the ninth time (granted you were the one who died the last eight times).

Ollie’s mom is an architect, and as a result their chartreuse colored, geometrically shaped duplex stands out of your white picket fenced neighborhood like a Picasso amongst Kinkades. When you ring the doorbell, you’re greeted by the blood curdling screech of a tabby cat. Sato, the obscenely fat cat, claws its way into Ollie’s arms as he opens the door.

He’s radiant as ever, wearing a garish Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned at the top and a dash of yellow acrylic above his toothy grin.

“You’ve got something-”

“Oh?” He licks his lips. You snort. Sato hisses.

“I’ve been working on this,” Ollie leads you into the kitchen. “I was gonna show you after I finished but yeah.”

It’s a still life of sunflowers, soaked with sunlight and alight with dew.

“I messed up the proportions on the stems.” 

“Mmmm. I can see that.” You can see that it is just perfect.

Ollie plops down on the couch and digs out the remote from between two cushions.You stay at the table and run your hand through the yellow paints as he sifts through cheesy romcoms, ninety six installments of Fast and Furious, and newsfeed about the end of the world. The paint is soft and viscous, like fluffy mud. It traces your palms like touch. Dried out, rubbery chunks embed themselves in the emptiness between your nails and your fingertips.

“It’s up! It’s up!” Ollie shrieks.

You nearly fall off the chair. You wipe your hand on your jeans and join him.

It starts with the haunting theme. Ollie thinks it’s a Canadian folk song (Kingston being set in Kingston, Ontario) but you’re pretty sure it’s just an orchestral rendition of Yesterday Once More. You take out the cookies and the two of you polish them off them like coin slot machines with your eyes glued to the screen. When it ends, Ollie’s eyes are red.

It was the best thing you’ve ever seen. Ollie was of course, completely wrong. But you weren’t completely right either. It was an ending no one could’ve dreamed of, and it was just perfect.

When it ends, the room gets a bit colder as the end of the world encroaches. The robins stop singing and Sato stops whining. From a window, you can see into the neighbors’ living room, can see Mr. Levinson holding his cane in one hand and Mrs. Levinson in the other.

You pull out Mrs. Dalloway and hand it to him. “I really really really love it.”

“Really?” His face breaks into that signature grin.

“Yeah.”

On any other day, you’d gush. You’d laugh and do impressions and muse about Virginia Woolf’s tortured genius and the writers of Kingston’s tortured genius. But the end of the world makes everything so small. You sigh and put your hand on Ollie’s and he doesn’t pull away.

You think of mom one thousand miles away on her business trip in Colorado, looking up at the sky. You think of dad six thousand miles away blackout drunk in some Vegas casino, looking up at the sky. You think of Ollie right beside you, looking down at your hand on his.

You don’t quite know what love is. 

Is it hotter than the radiation between you, that burns through your clothes, burns through your skin, burns through your muscles, your bones, your heart? Is it brighter than the pieces of sun captured by a sunflower captured by a painter? Is it softer than Liquitex acrylics? Is it deeper than regret, stronger than shame, better than the finale of Kingston?

Is it bigger than the end of the world?

You don’t want to be disgusting, and you don’t want him to say something stupid like “no homo”, but you really want to lick that dash of yellow acrylic off his face. You close your eyes, lean in. Your cheeks are burning and for a moment you don’t know whether you’re sad or glad it’ll all be over soon.