For the third installment of the Writing Workshop series, I am using the same prompt that was featured previously in Sara Pousti’s piece, “How Resilience Found Beauty”: More than anything, I wanted to tell the world…
I’ve always been fascinated by the poem ‘A song on the the End of the World,’ by Czeslaw Milosz, and I took a more light-hearted spin on this topic in this short narrative.
More than anything, I needed to tell everyone that the world would end in four days. There would be no explosions; the earth would not be swallowed up into a fireball or overrun by the seas; there would be no panic, fear, or tears. It would simply end. It would be the end of existence. And I was privy to this knowledge. The onus was on me to tell everyone—no, not to warn everyone because truly, there was nothing that could be prevented; no amount of creative thinking, faith, quantum physics, or even magic could stop this. But still, everyone deserved to know, so they could spend their last moments in . . . um, self-fulfillment?
Yet, here I am, enlightened and prepared, having the worst case of procrastination ever, because do you realize how much work it is to get out an announcement like that? I’d have to contact all the major media sources—CNN, the Times, NBC, etc., and these are only the ones in the US! On top of that, who would even believe me?! Everyone would laugh it off or go into a panic. Just the thought of it makes me want to crawl back into bed and put it off until tomorrow. But eventually, I will run out of tomorrow. (Macbeth puts it best, for I have only three of them.)
So, here I am, staring at the phone and the phone staring back at me. Who do I call? My best friend? My doctor? My mother? My mother must know someone who knows someone. Everyone is separated by only seven degrees of freedom, so the reality is, I only need this message to get through seven people before someone important gets a hold of it and takes over.
Courtesy of PhotoGram through Creative Commons Attribution 2.0
Seconds tick away. I once knew a guy who worked with femtosecond lasers or something cool like that. I can’t even fathom a femtosecond. Maybe I should call him, but perhaps in his frame of reference of time, four days is as good as an eternity, since it’s the femtoseconds that matter to him. The best thing to do is to just tell the next person who gives me a call. I’ll just bring it up nonchalantly because it’s a matter of fact anyway. I wonder if this is how the dinosaurs felt before the asteroid hit the earth and wiped them out. Did one of them know? Did one of them sense it in the air or see it in their dreams? How did I even come to know that the world will end in four days? Surely there will be questions. They’ll label me as a
prophet, or a psycho, or both. But I’m just a 25 year-old person who goes to school and works at Applebee’s at night. Somehow, I just know. I’m not convinced. I know.
Maybe there are others like me, other who also know. Maybe everyone knows, and I’m just the dimwitted one who thinks I’ve been specially endowed with this knowledge. No one has called me yet, so do I just wait? Who even makes phone calls anymore?
Aishan Shi is a fourth-year medical student and recent MBA grad from UA COM-Phoenix. She graduated in 2013 from The University of Arizona with bachelor’s degrees in biochemistry, molecular and cellular biology, and English. Her interests include medical humanities, structural biology, Shakespeare, stuff in the realm of postmodernism, and cartoons. She aims to bring all these interests together in medicine. To contact Aishan, please email her at ashi1[at]email.arizona.edu.