The End of the World

I’d accepted the numbness by then. Months of it—couldn’t laugh, couldn’t cry, just this hollow thing moving through Berlin from party to party, person to person, never really present. Everything had flattened into gray. I looked everywhere for something to break it and found nothing.

Then it flips. No explosion, no dramatic moment, no reason. Just something in my head that switches. Suddenly I have to move, have to escape, have to get out of this dead routine that became permanent.

I’m walking through the city with tears on my face. Not from love or death or loss or pride—something simpler and worse. Something I’d buried, filed away as dead, suddenly ignites. And I can’t hold it, can’t understand it, I want desperately to keep what’s been destroying me, and it’s already gone and I’m falling apart because of it.

I call my friends drunk at 3am begging for something—order, reason, an explanation, anything. But nobody can give it to me because we don’t know what the problem is. What is my problem, exactly? So at 5am I write these pseudo-depressive texts and by morning I want to throw the computer in a dumpster and watch it burn.

No music touches this. Nothing works. So I wait, rocking back and forth in bed, wondering if I’m imagining it all or if it’s just too much beer, too many people, too much darkness that keeps looking at me and shrugging toward the next sunrise—like the sunrise will finally know what to do.

I’m a sad lunatic in the dark, rocking. All the color’s gone from my eyes. Waiting for something to hit, some word or piece of news that turns me into a fireball, that lets me finally join in the burning of this small world I built. Because one second is all it takes. Everything changes, and I’m still here waiting for it to land.