THINGS CAN GET WORSE.

‘You know this thing where they say, “Hell isn’t a place, it’s this week”?’ he asks and I nod, looking around. One could never be too cautious, and needs to always have bouncy feet, be at the edge, a little extra than how one usually is. “Back in my times they call it ‘anxiety’”, Grandma told me once. “Well back in times before that they call it hysteria”, I had said. “Now it’s the normal. Deal with it.” “That’s not what hysteria meant”, she would shake her head in disdain, and I left. Now, I’ve trailed off of what he was talking, I realize right when he stands still before me. ‘It’s the same’, he continues. ‘Apocalypse is more of a feeling, man. It’s... it’s not a happening, you know? It’s always been there.’

    ‘Uh huh’, I nod, and cast one last glance. Welp, he’d eaten enough now. I pull his hand and raise an eyebrow to confirm that question. He nods. ‘Alright then, I think we should leave.’

    ‘Not even a kiss as a return favour, after all that I did for you?’ he pouts as he walks to my pull.

    I chuckle. ‘For what, eating for yourself?’ I look at his face, my ears keeping an alert mode on for us.

    He grins. ‘I’m demandy, you see. They say anything you do, sealing it with a kiss makes it better.’

    I laugh aloud. At this point, I honestly don’t care if there was anyone else upstairs. ‘You have all of me and we live together and I still get to hear your cheesy excuses to have a kiss.’

    He holds my waist. ‘Well that would never wear off.’

    ‘Well hello demandy’, smiling, I lean in for a kiss. He’s troubled, I can say. Thinking about something. His kisses are always soft, and there isn’t nothing much to think about or worry about. There is only space to feel the tenderness and drown in it. I smile against his lips and then lean back. ‘The pleasure is mine to serve your “demandiness”.’ I don’t like it when he says that, and I am tired of telling him to stop saying he is demandy. At this point, I’m used to it. It’s a blindspot in his brain – he never stops feeling he is “demandy”. We’re all that we have for each other anyway, so it is always perfectly fine.

    ‘You always have something in stock to give me’, he snuggles for a bit and walks by me, our feet carefully placing themselves on the wet floor. ‘Compliments, kisses, cuddles, love...’

    ‘Except food’, I nod, admitting. And I hear him scoff. It has been getting worse, and we both know it.

    ‘It is neither your fault nor mine’, he says firmly, but I still can’t help feeling responsible for that. We both scale the area, have look-out times to get food, but it has been my primary responsibility. I don’t know if I am really slacking off that, or if the food is actually going off, or if the shops really are being shut down quicker and quicker, or if I’m mad at the world that he eats only four times a month compared to the ten times a month he usually does.

    “Why do you say it’s getting worse?” Grandma had asked once. “It was never better or good to even begin with.” “Jeez thanks to your generation”, I had said. “No it’s not ours”, her voice always went calm and confident when she told that. “We resisted things getting worst and it happened anyway. What you had to begin with was the worst already. Apparently it is still always true that when you think things can’t get worse, they always do.”

    I’m thinking about Grandma a lot, especially after the apocalypse has been announced to set into motion. I know my insides are shuddering, but I cannot feel it. My way back home is around him – he walks me across or I follow him. I never know where that slips, where I stop being the person to walk in the front and look out for us, but then, now, I’m following him. Like every time. A pain shoots up inside my head. It’s been a week since I’d eaten too, but I lied to him. Because if I don’t, he would want to share. We can’t afford to share, we would both be hungry. Also, if we had taken food for me from there, it’d have surpassed and been noticed – sure it is a broken store with a very easy way to break in, but the security does work. I have a feeling he knows I lied, but perhaps he was too hungry and had let me get away with it, and then will also forget it. I will find some place to eat, either tomorrow or day after tomorrow. Nights were safer than days, and that’s when I come out with him. We can’t risk it anyways. But I like going out in the day. Perhaps afternoon then. I’d make sure he’s asleep, and he just never wakes until it’s evening. So that’d give me time to raid.

    That’s when the horns start blaring around us, and I look at him, and he doesn’t. Security breach that food has gone missing. We take on our feet just to be cautious – we don’t get caught, we never do, but still, we take on our feet.

    ‘Got you three bars of chocolate and a loaf of bread for the both of us’, he says, minutes past us running towards home.

    I look at him, and I want to wrestle him to the ground and laugh with him, kiss him surely. Just when you think it can’t get worse, it does. Just like when you’re sure you can’t love more than this, you end up loving even more.

I punch him on his arm when we get home and he lets a “Ow”.

    ‘I don’t know what to do with you!’ my voice is shrill as I squish his cheeks.

    ‘Just hold me close through the apocalypse’, he says, looking straight into my eyes.

    I keep my face straight. I will not show how tempted I am for the millionth time to just squeeze him into a miniature and have him in my pocket. ‘Well someone said that the apocalypse is more of a feeling than an actual thing.’

    ‘Yes it’s all in our head’, he says with his serious face again, the way he looks when we set out to find supplies. The way he looks rarely, when he’s distant, and a look on him that somehow scares me for some reason. I don’t know why, but.

    I pat on his back, and he turns around to hand over the chocolate and bread to me. ‘Whatever is coming, it’s a real thing, like a pandemic. Like the one Grandma used to say about.’

    ‘They’ve seen it coming, didn’t they?’ he asks, and I nod. ‘They don’t see it going, I’m sure.’

    ‘Nothing really goes away’, I shrug, opening a chocolate bar and pointing it at him, asking if he needs a bite. He shakes his head for a no. I loved biting into chocolates – they dissolved quickly, and the taste never stays in the mouth – the way I wish things were. It’s easier to forget that I had them. Like the apocalypse. It’s been crossing my head a lot now, like my Grandma. He and I never talked about it, but we both know we’re scared. Dead scared. I wonder if we would ever talk about that, but. I don’t think we’re both ready to. If the apocalypse falls over us, supplies will weaken. We are not sure if there will be natural disasters. Perhaps the land will topple over. We will have to move. But we don’t know. It is like lying under a plain grey sky and when you stare up at it long enough, it feels like it’s going to fall on you, and you shudder. I didn’t know what we should do – console each other? That it will be fine? Fine? We don’t really console each other, either. Nothing specifically goes wrong around us.

    I finish the bar of chocolate and look at my watch. We both decided to dig a well – we know there was literally no reason for a well to exist, but that would give us something to engage in considering we lost our jobs two months back (life wasn’t so much better back then either, but at least we could buy two meals a week, instead of always taking it ourselves), and some escape from this whole apocalypse. He says it’s all in the head. It has always been like this, agreed. But maybe he is right. But is he? We’ve hunted for supplies as long as we could remember, and even before that, since from when I was a child. The land was weird, and the sky was always grey, and everything is the same. Had Grandma been here, she’d perhaps say something, but she isn’t. She was so particular about words, and I wonder what she would say if she heard the word “apocalypse”. What would she say, “Back in my days, it was an ‘impossibility’”? I’m pretty sure she will not say anything so lame.

    I turn and find him watching me, and I look down.

    ‘I know I promised you I’d take a video of you when you think so you can see what I see, but I was distracted!’ he raises his hand in surrender.

    I scoff. ‘I’ve said it a zillion times and I will say it again –’

    ‘Same’, he cuts me, walking to me. I turn to him and hold his eyes. His fingers play and caress with mine. ‘I’ve said it a zillion times and I will say it again’, he says soft and firm. ‘You’ve not seen what I’ve seen.’

    I clear my throat and raise my face. ‘Well you’re unlucky because you don’t see what I see.’

    He chuckles and leans in. His nose wiggles with mine, and I squeeze my eyes shut, smooching his lips lightly. He then pulls away. ‘Go sleep’, I say.

     ‘I don’t want to’, he says, pouting. He ruffles my hair and cups my face. ‘I really don’t want to.’

    I shake my head firmly. ‘No you have to. You haven’t slept in two weeks and that’s too long. I’ll lie with you’, I add quickly.

    His face brightens up, and I laugh. We have a couch on a bed – both of them not spacious. I usually sleep on the couch and he on the bed. He cramps himself to the corner of his bed against his wall, and I get next to him. I close his eyes with my fingers and he chuckles, and I place a kiss over each eye. I remember him saying once that someone said kissing over the eye takes away the bad dreams, and ever since, I’ve been doing that. He gets bad dreams like I do – a lot – but when he does, it’s hard to get him back together. So we do our best. I turn on my side and he settles more comfortably. I gently pat on his chest, feeling his heaving chest on my palm. I’d never grow tired of putting him to sleep will I.

    I try thinking what Grandma would say if she’d been here. I wish she were here. I don’t know why, but I wish that. I turn to him when I feel him move. He leans on his side, and I give a slight frown. He wants to talk. My body slightly tremors, and I don’t know why.

    ‘What do you think your grandmother would’ve said?’ he asks, and I blink. ‘About these times. I just remembered her.’

    ‘I...’ve been thinking about her’, I admit, still surprised.

    ‘She always talks about how love changes the world’, he says. ‘She never lived long to see it.’

    I snort. ‘None of us will.’

    He takes my hand in his, and I know it’s something serious. He doesn’t look at my eyes for a few seconds, and then does. ‘What do you think the apocalypse is going to do?’

    I take in a deep breath. There it has come. ‘I... don’t know. It can get worse. Maybe we’ll have to relocate, maybe we’ll have to be nomads’, my eyes go dreamy and he sees that.

    He grins widely. ‘Oh you’ve always wanted to be one.’

    I shrug. ‘It’s not a bad idea. And it’s not very different either.’ His smile slowly fades, and I don’t think he knows that. He looks down and caresses the back of my palm with his thumb. I sigh, and pull him into a hug. He is trembling and I know he also feels me trembling.

    ‘I’m scared’, he mutters against my neck. ‘I don’t think we’re going to meet an apocalypse. I think the world has died last with the generation of your Grandmother, and it has, and we’re all just... dead, you know. We’re all just walking corpses.’

    I pull him away and look at him incredulous. ‘Don’t say that’, I plead. ‘That’s ridiculous. Didn’t you say it yourself?’ I say quickly. ‘It’s maybe not even real. Maybe we’re just going to have another economic depression.’ I stop. I want to be careful with anything that I say. The shivers in my body rise, and my fist clench. I see him notice that, but he doesn’t say anything. I bit my lip and decide to not say anything until he asks.

    ‘You do believe that the apocalypse is only a state of mind?’ he asks.

    ‘I don’t know’, I admit.

    ‘Remember your grandmother saying about anxiety and depression as normal states of being?’ he asks, and I nod. She does say that. ‘That’s how I think apocalypse is. I also think that we’re all already dead. And I’m scared.’

    My heart crunches. I am too. Yes. I pull him into a hug again, and this time, he doesn’t hug me back. He just lets me hold him. I plant a kiss on his head. ‘How worse can it get?’ he asks, curling into me. ‘Maybe we should leave. And start being nomads.’

    I smoothen his hair down the back of his neck. ‘I think we can.’ We sure can. Maybe we’ll dig a well in some other place. We lie there just like that – me hugging and patting him, and he curling into me, breathing into my body. I take in a deep breath, and then slowly pull him away. He looks at me wearily. ‘You do make sense, you know. Perhaps the apocalypse passed with Grandma.’

    His eyes fell a notch inside. ‘So... we’re walking corpses?’

    I shake my head and run a hand through his hair. ‘No. Which means we’re at the era after apocalypse, which means we survived apocalypse. Maybe you’re right, maybe we’re evolving into a normal state of being – the apocalypse.’

    ‘Remember the stories your Grandma says?’ something loosens in him, and I could live for that.

    ‘Revolution and love winning the world?’ I ask, and he nods. ‘That’s all she ever talked about.’

    ‘I think it’s a cool way of thinking’, he smiles. Yes he smiles. Yes he’s slightly better. I kiss his forehead.

    ‘That’s how we’re going to live’, I say, looking into his eyes, snuggling close to him. He closes his eyes and leans his forehead on mine, exhaling. ‘That’s how we’re going to live. In an era after apocalypse. It’s post-apocalypse for us now, and we’ve survived it.’ His hands pull me to close nay gap between us, and I smile.

    Just when you think it can’t get worse, it does. Just like when you’re sure you can’t love more than this, you end up loving even more.