The Name of the End

(CW: Grief, depression)

There is a bomb in my hometown, and no one speaks about it.

The park that surrounds it acts like a nest, grown up naturally around the smooth, rounded metal body that lies half buried in the soil, the ground itself embracing it.

Sensible people would put it out of their minds altogether, but ever since my classmates and I discovered it by sneaking past the barbed wire fence into its clearing, I was never able to. At first, I had been disappointed. This, a charcoal grey container, half hidden by moss and bracken, was the affront that everyone avoided even looking at as they went by?

Only when I got home that evening – when I saw how my mother reacted to the news of where I had been – did I gain my first inkling of understanding.

Her face drained of all colour, her lips slackened, and her eyes widened as though trying to drink in all of me for fear that I might have suddenly disappeared. Her hands trembled as her arms encircled me, and she dropped to her knees as she held me close to her body, buried her face in my hair. The top of my head grew wet with her tears as she held on tightly, and whispered a plea, begging me never to go near it again, saying that the thing could go off any day now and no one knew what damage it would do.

That was the first time I learned of my own impermanence. That there was a world before me, and one day, would be a world after.

Eventually, I would thank my mother for doing that for me, especially after looking back on the untruths some of my fellow adventurers had been told by their parents when they went home with the news of what we had found. The lies they were told that night stayed with me for a long time. That the bomb would one day take people away, to a place beyond the clouds. That the bomb was inert, or wasn’t what people say it is at all. Or, worse, that when the inevitable happened, it won’t impact them.

All thought of it was denied out of hand.

That year, my 11^th year, I was intrigued. I asked my teachers, the parents of friends, my fellow classmates, everyone who would listen what they thought would happen to them if the bomb went off, knowing only that it one day would; I got a mixture of responses from bewilderment to bemusement, and from shock to anger.

During my 13^th year, when my teacher had me visit a lady with a pinched brow and motivational posters on her walls, who played meditative cassettes and talked like I myself was something liable to explode, I stopped asking.

And then, during my 15^th year, I got angry.

There is a bomb in my hometown, and no one does anything about it.

I visited the bomb often. There, pacing around its clearing, I would shout questions at its silent form, squat and stubborn, crouched in its cradle of natural beauty, demanding to know why. Why us? It wasn’t fair, why did we have to deal with it? Why wouldn’t anyone save us from it? Did it have a name I could cuss it out with? I did so anyway without an answer to the latter, often and loudly.

And then, finally, the questions became a desperate attempt at bartering: what would it take to make it just go away? Why didn’t it just go off already, and get it over with? What if I did something about it?

In a sudden spurt of reckless, spiteful, spitfire fury, I whirled around and delivered a solid kick to the thick, armoured, bug like carapace of the bomb.

Time slowed.

My chest seized, my face falling and limbs suddenly weightless as though I were rising out of my body altogether, and in a fraction of a sudden second, I understood the fear of my mother.

The reality of a world without me was, in that moment, closer than it had ever been.

And still the bomb remained silent and unmoved. In that moment, nothing changed but me, and only it bore witness.

Bewildered, I had slowly turned and hobbled home, mind overwhelmed with some great weight, my foot sporting freshly broken toes that my mother gently splinted, never asking me what I’d been doing to earn my wound. She didn’t need to, and there was a terrible understanding that lived in her silence as she worked.

The next day, I did not move from my bed, and mother left me alone.

I don’t remember my 16^th birthday, or the two birthdays that followed; I went about the motions of my life with a hollow in my chest, seeing work and play both as just distractions from the inevitable dark that we all once were, and one day would once again be.

But, throughout this – even though it felt as though it had stopped altogether – time had instead ticked on quietly in the background, healing me gradually. Like the hands of my mother, bandaging me when I bled or broke, like her soft kiss on the top of my head when she thought I was too asleep to notice and squirm away with teenage attitude, like her preparing a meal for me when I return from long evenings with those as young and scared as me.

Through these small things, done often, my mother and time were natural partners in my healing, even though only time knew when the bomb would be due.

I awoke back into my life when I began to ask questions again.

Slowly, not in ignorance of my own impermanence, but in acceptance of it, I began to fill the hollow in my chest. I called my mother and told her I loved her. I opened a shop and sold painstakingly curated tomes to curious strangers. I looked out across my little town, with its patch of verdant green in the very middle, and saw that it was at its most beautiful when the setting sun sent its last golden rays dancing across it, through trees and glass-windowed spires, in between brick built chimneys and along the metal spokes of bridges.

There is a bomb in my hometown, and in every home, there are people living with the bomb that has no name and with its friend time, the overseer of the eventual reckoning.

On the day I decided to visit the bomb as an adult, for the first time in many years, I packed a few of the books from my shop, closed early, and began a reverent procession to the barbed wire fence, squirming under it before taking my time in reaching the clearing.

For a long moment, I simply stood at the edge of the clearing and stared at this thing that had occupied my mind for so many years.

My body had housed so many feelings towards it – or because of it – where now there was silence.

Softly, I slunk closer, as though trying not to wake a sleeper, and sat next to the bulk of it, legs folded under me as I freed a book from my bag and begin to read, the branches above me curving inward under the light autumn breeze. Nature held me just as carefully as it held its other man-made tenant.

There is a bomb in my hometown, and there is something etched onto its side, peeking up from under the grime that has accumulated over the years that it has lain dormant.

I thumbed away the grime to reveal the name of the thing, the answer to one of my longest held questions.

There was a bomb in my hometown, and its name was –