Doomsdays

Even when the sky fell, we thought the world to be wonderful. Most (not all) of you have only imagined it, but I remember: the rush of sudden and unbelievable heat, vaporizing lagoons and living things, and the shockwaves shattering trees and rockfall and leaving so many people deafened and dead—and the light, the light, a light so bright that it was darkness. 

Before our doomsday, the world was superlative, superabundant, though we had no way of cataloging every jungle with eyes slitted amidst gigantic ferns, savannahs and thriving wastelands, marshes where footfalls squelched and loathsome things slithered in the reeds.  Some people were absolutely enormous, and others so dangerous you dared not meet their eyes.  We were always hungry, and always wary. But I liked chasing dragonflies with their prodigious wings, sometimes catching them in a delicious, inky crunch. I don’t suppose I’d appreciate the flavor today, having grown too accustomed to the wickedness of monosodium glutamate and the occasional indulgence of the loner at the sushi bar. Anyways, everything was a plenitude. So much was alive! I might have written it all down, but we couldn’t know what writing might be; I dreamt of words, but these did not yet exist. Still we called the world wonderful. 

I can only ask whether you’d agree today.  Think of the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen—too much will come to mind, and you’ll tell me no, let me do the top three, wait, I can’t decide, I’ll make a list. The face of a lover, saying those words, or a newborn’s astonished cry.  A seraphic city you always wanted to see, or a national park where still the buffalo roam. A flower, a rose in your family garden and you believed it would be perfect forever. We marveled at our beauties too, and couldn’t have picked—the sunsets over a volcanic event, lava roiling beneath watercolor reds (though how could we know watercolor?). The traceries of veins in our gargantuan leaves (there weren’t flowers yet), or a clutch of eggs cradled between the roots of solemn trees, where the little ones hatched with tiny chirps.  The dilating pupils of our own loves (yes, we knew of love). 

And then the sky fell upon the wonderful world. Now, I can only speak about it with that numbness with which grief finds a way to be voiced without a scream. Most of my brethren died, by fire or frostbite, by starvation or scavenger, when the atmosphere blackened and the cold enveloped our despair. The moon seemed larger than it does today, and just as now we had perceived eyes and stories in its pockmarks.  But it too became wasted, ghosted and ghouled behind thickening clouds. I’ve proven more resilient than many others, not because of any exceptional strength, but only freakish luck and an extreme adaptability, driven by my desire to see what happens next.  This is an old, old wish, and a long-lived one. 

I won’t bore you with the details of my survival (nutrition, shelter, mourning). In many ways, life grew repetitive: heatwave eons with tropical plants blooming at the poles, and then the glaciers groaning towards the equator, and back-and-forth again. Continents shattered, and new shores made the shapes of faces (or would’ve, if maps existed). I longed for an Airstream trailer, which I’d take to some balmy fishfolks’ beach. But I had no idea what an Airstream was. 

People remained interesting, arriving and vanishing: dappled canines with hulking spines, miniature cats, deer whose antlers obscured the Milky Way. The whales wearied, and returned to the seas. In the emerging birds with their feathers and flute-bones, I saw my innocent kin, but somehow, I only wanted to tell them I was sorry. Saber-tooths launched themselves at melancholic wooly mammoths, who were the first of all mammals to stargaze.

I evolved, warming my blood, sloughing scales into skin and sprouting fur where necessary, letting my skeleton rearrange. I made myself Holocene.  And you took form, and copying you I adopted the legerdemain of opposable thumbs and treasured my new hyoid bone; this was when you invented words, when learnt to say moon, and I wept.

I delighted in flint-fires and ochre handprints upon cavern walls, painted aurochs and the graceful hunt and the numinous figures of divinities, though lamenting the dupes who sampled poisonous mushrooms first.  I observed the different ways you created civilizations, tribes and cities, arrowheads, breads and plows and countless ways to tell the dead, I will remember. Earthworks, frail boats, and a profusion of poetries that still could not contain the world—so much is possible! Remember the history lessons: years, names, metropolises and battlegrounds, pottery, astrolabes, fireworks, encyclopedias and handed-down tales, the sight of Jupiter’s reeling moons—

But I watched, witnessing your innumerable ways of harrowing the flesh, the slave ships whose wakes are boneyards and horror upon the ocean floor, the ingenious atrocities of empire, the slaughter of continental multitudes, knowledge and lives made ash. I have seen doomsdays happen over and over again.  Flash-back: when light—darkest light, light that extinguishes—annihilated tens of thousands of people, when the atom ruptured and a star erupted upon the planet, I almost gave up. My skin is glazed with isotopes, but I’ve persisted, to see what happens next (I have a feeling). 

I laugh at illustrations of how we dinosaurs looked; I wasn’t that color, but a tranquil blue. But because I’ve grown too exhausted to think of alternatives—I never developed wings—I participate in it all. Like everyone, I seek to overcome distance, to have my wants immediately, to approach lightspeed.  I’ve made peace with the belching factories. I acquired my Airstream, which I tow with internal combustion, aware that all this acceleration is propelled by the burning of forgotten beings, and every moment comes closer to boiling the skies.  The long, long history of the Earth compresses into a list of what is (and will be) lost. 

Still, I believe this world is wonderful—think of all the beautiful things you’ve loved, write them down. There are so many stories to tell. Yesterday I found a robin’s egg, lying exquisite in the grass. Nonetheless, seldom do I mention my own memories, the heartbreak and the darkest light, the (repeating) rhythm of the end of a world. And most of the time, I can’t believe that we actually existed, and we were wonderful, and I can’t believe that it has disappeared.

We dinosaurs are almost, almost entirely gone, and we are everywhere. We preoccupy you, and make our appearances on lunchboxes and in fabulous films (the imagination is omnivorous). In your museums, we are the most enticing exhibits—our bones wrenched from their graves, wires upholding our grins—we remind you of something, and you think us wonders in the history of this world.  Though you do not realize it, we are watching you, teeth bared.