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People used to call me a fighter. 592Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ11KUKTzBpC
I mean, literally, people said that to me.
“Lizzie, you’re such a fighter” or “You’ll be ok Lizzie, you’re a fighter.”
I fought the grief of my sister’s death. Ka-pow!
I fought the same cancer when it tried to take me. Blammo!
I fought deadbeat boyfriends, I fought for promotions that should have been handed to me and for respect that I had already earned. Crash! Whap! Boom!
Lizzie. The fighter.
But you couldn’t hurt them. You couldn’t stop them. You couldn’t fight them.
So, I hung up my gloves and found other hobbies.
Hiding. Running. Foraging. Surviving.
All the fun stuff.
I was twenty-two when my life in the dark began, when the creatures took over. I was considered pretty back then, back when things like takeaway coffee and phones and subway trains and interior lighting were things to critique and complain about instead of things to dream hopeless dreams about. Ok, so maybe I was a little chubby around the middle but luckily nothing gets rid of that stubborn belly roll like the apocalypse.
We used to love in the light and fuck in the dark, now we did everything in blackness; hide, run, eat, drink, hold hands, kiss, feel, reach out for one another. Tunnels, sewers, basements, attics, caves, crypts. All the places we hardly ever (or never) wanted to be were now our favourite hangout spots. Moonless nights, dark tunnels, pitch black passages, impenetrable shadows. Happening places, you dig?
For the past seventeen years, the subway tunnels I had spent my former life rushing to get through, to get out of, had been home to me and two hundred and three other survivors (and counting). Not exactly living large but it was living.
I say “me” and the others but at first, it was “us” and the others.
My boyfriend and I. His name was Simon. His name matters to me but it’s alright if it doesn’t matter to you. We were together for about a year before it happened and for another year after it happened. I spent our first year together wondering if we were working, if I had finally found the one, if we’d get married, buy a dream house and have babies. I spent our last year together knowing we were working, knowing I had found the one, and knowing we would probably never get married, never buy a dream house and never have babies.
On Babies aka The Future of our Species:
More than a few kids had been conceived and born in our subway home to add to the child population already there. I listened to parents explaining the ways of our sad new world to kids who would be raised to something resembling adulthood underground, never seeing the sun or even a birthday candle. Most of them, once they reached sixteen, would at least see the moon when they were out on supply runs but, as the saying went, if you were seeing the moon then you wouldn’t be seeing it for long. The meaning being, if there was moonlight, then you needed to get somewhere dark quickly or you’d be killed.
Ripped apart.
It’s a joke. Ha ha ha.
I listened to women giving birth and I listened to mothers and fathers or ad-hoc guardians preparing their sixteen-year-olds for their first supply run and knew, even if it made me a traitor to my species, that I could not bring a life into this world.
Simon agreed.
We’d be together. That was enough. More than a lot of people had. Something, someone, to hang onto in a world gone…well, just gone, mostly. This was back in the early days, back when (despite everything) we all felt sure this couldn’t possibly go on forever (silly us). We’d outlive the apocalypse together or, worst case scenario, if the apocalypse never ended (but that totally wasn’t going to happen, right?) we’d live our lives together in it and find the happiness we could in each other’s arms.
That was the plan. As much as there was one.
You’d think, having lived through the end of the world, we’d know better than to think we knew anything. That we’d have known our plans didn’t mean anything to those things. That our “worst case scenario” was nothing near it.
In the end, there was my man, there was a supply run, and there was the moon.
And “us” became “me”.
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