Going into Oblivion
Extremely nihilistic final thoughts from a woman commuting home during a nuclear strike. Please only read if you're in a good, thoughtful space <3
It was the brightest light she ever saw.
Speeding down the highway, rushed to get home after a day of work, she watched the treelines on either side of the road get swallowed up by the horizon. Those darkened branches had their edges eaten away by the illumination for just an instant; fuzzed them out of reality, obscured the smallest outer branches and slimmed bigger branches down to their essence- the impression of trees.
Everything faded into a vignette around the mushroom cloud formed like a bellowing omniscient entity tethered to the land and stretching to the sky to dominate humankind.
Looking hard enough she could almost see the impression of an anguished face in the bloom.
Jesus.
She saw a video about this one time when she was doom (hah!) scrolling through her free time. It was an old informational commercial or video from the Cold War times to prepare citizens for nuclear fallout. What did the video say?
For all the useless shit she had consumed, of all the information she gawked her agape eyes at and swallowed down for dopamine instead of a pill, she couldn't remember anything. For all the time she wasted rotting behind that glowing screen, she had nothing positive to show for it except a brief reprieve from her self-loathing.
She continued going 80 mph towards the horizon in a moth-like fascination. She didn't know what to do. She never knew what to do.
She felt compelled to stop, but no one else was pulling over. She had always been so goddamn meek.
There was only so much time before she would start to feel the effects of the bomb.
Her phone alarmed in the cup holder several times, piercing her pity and self-absorbed thoughts. On the screen were a series of missed calls and message icons, and a big black box of text.
She slightly released the gas as she read the words on the screen.
The government had issued a warning about the hazardous nuclear conditions. The message advised to lay face down and push your jaw closed tight to keep teeth from shattering while the shock waves passed through; to use your hands to protect your skull: cover your ears with your thumbs and shield the softness of your eyeballs with the remaining fingers.
The government was issuing advice on how to cower from the only natural enemy we created on Earth. Weren’t these nuclear weapons made to equilibrate power in mutually assured destruction? To raise the consequences to a global scale and prevent their use altogether? This should be impossible.. unless it was self-sabotage. Perhaps the government was sending an altogether different message in hard-launched tyranny.
How did humans go from scratching their asses and throwing shit at each other to flirting with the power of antiquated gods? When did we seal the deal (perhaps with a kiss) for mass oblivion? Humans were meant to create. Is this how the insatiable cycle of purpose ends? Self-implosion by our own hand? The irony.
She wished for the pleasures of animalistic acceptance. These complex thoughts, this sentience never did her much good and only served some imagined purpose. She was an intelligence trapped in the monotony of a hamster wheel. She was a moth incinerated by the very warm glow she gravitated to now, hurtling down the highway. She had always been a victim.
Still, no one else was stopping. How long did she have before the blast would affect her? How far was she from the event? Was she a safe distance for now? Was she even remarkable enough to survive?
She supposed not.
The most flattering thing that could come from her existence would be a single digit barely inflating the statistics to come from this event. Just a small fraction of a rounding number in a phenomenon, a ghost figure dubbed ‘0’ at the end of a string of other numbers. Googlable…
Even so, where would she hide from the radioactivity? She had no protection in her car, no preparedness. She hadn’t even the foresight to be remotely afraid until now.
She pictured those who were vaporized instantly at impact. When the radioactivity finally reached her, would she be eviscerated, too? Would her flesh be eroded, then her bones, leaving her failing conscious to reflect on her life as she disappeared?
Like the trees who were smudged out of existence for a moment- would that be her life? A blip?
Her self would finally be cleansed to the essences of her own thoughts, her own feelings, her own self in the truest form it could ever be when it wasn’t constantly conflated and conflicted with perceptions of herself in the framework of everyone else's lives and minds.
She would be stripped down to her truest form, a singular, solitary, contained consciousness with only her very own brain to impress upon itself.
She imagined veering her car into the median on an open stretch of the highway, fumbling with the door handle and flinging herself out to strew about the dried, prickly grass.
She tried to picture the sensation of the grass, bowing under her weight and tickling against her bare skin.
Maybe they would find her here, lying next to her idling car seemingly eating the grass like a fucking cow, limp and weak.
At least someone out there, someone to join her in the same integer, may have lived a life they owned. She envied the people stuck inside for fallout. Away from their phones and notifications, they were oblivious and unable to take action. They were excused from the obligation of decision. They had it best; They- at least- had blissful unawareness to slip discreetly into the bright light sheathing them like a warm blanket from the paralyzing fear and confrontation of the ultimate self.
They didn’t have to see themselves shit scared and cowardly. They didn't have to see their monetized life, herded and corralled like cattle into organizations and corporate structures, completely dissolve at the hands of likely the very same people who prodded them into the farm to begin with! All these habits, necessitated out of redundant debt, never reflected her purpose. When she gets eaten away by the gamma rays, she will simply be a lost consumer. Boiled down to her essences and purpose in this world, that was really all she was at the macroscopic lens. Not even a woman once zoomed out far enough. She was just 1 billionth of a consumer.
She was stuck fighting against a system which would never crumble and only betrayed her personal interest in order to sustain itself. Queue her regional area being remodeled as a nuclear wasteland by her own likeness.
At least some people out there were experiencing their final moments in sweet innocence, still invested in the farce of society, not regretting being conceived and cursing the gift of awareness that sets them up for inevitable disappointment. She pictured women riding their men, sitting on penises and rocking themselves into an orgasm. Good for them, going out with dignity and getting some ass.
Not her, thought, with her imagined ass up in air while huffing wormshit from the ground.
She wished she could have given into more animalistic pleasures like she assumed everyone else did. She could have been more intensely devoted to each moment and craving than to the mission statement of some CEO bullshit. She could have known no shame and only the capsizing fear of the unknown at this exact moment instead of the awareness of abandonment and the feeling of being wasted flesh. She was only ever a corpse in this society.
How nice it would have been to earn her life at least, hunting or homesteading or maybe using these breasts of hers to rear children instead of filling her size A cup and boyfriend’s mouth between periods of vanilla sex.
But, instead, how like her sad self to be able to despise her position so much more than anyone of the same, uncontrollable demise. She could only ever pity herself, the 1 hidden figure she would own in the rounded, neatly zeroed-off death toll.
She always knew she would die alone, but what was the point if this was the inevitable end all along and nothing was ever really in her control to begin with?
We fight so hard to stay alive, but maybe this death is a release from these pressures to think so hard all the time. Death is a gentle emptying of the pet store fish from the plastic bag into the tank, abating stress. Death is slipping from the toil of shared expectations and inspection and necessitated participation to being simply nothing, and nothing being okay. Nothing in death is even eventually okay for the people who knew the living given enough time, once they die away, too, into the nothing.
If you can be nothing when alive and being dead is nothing, then what is the difference? She didn’t have to fight anymore, she thought, relieved, as she surrendered decision to closing the distance between herself and the horizon.