In the streets, under God’s vast sky, in the schools and the office buildings, in my apartment, all around, there’s a kind of ashen silence, a hollowness of experience, a confusion of meaning and purpose and instinct. It’s all a perfect facsimile of living, an exact copy, just to specification as if a director were walking though a set of the world, checking off his list. Ikea desk. Check. Perfectly average seasonal temperature. Check. Celebrity trials. Check. Still, the Director confides to an AD, perhaps it’s too exact, no?

The sky at sunset, the oranges and bruised purples muddle with the gray. Everything feels a little off. The trees still blow. The snow still melts. The sun still shines. It all looks just so. But it’s wrong too. There’s no mistaking it. There’s a smell, or no smell at all. Or it’s the wrong smell. Something is seriously missing.

Perhaps the world has died. The world’s soul has popped and evaporated. But the wicked part, the truly evil part, is that nobody has noticed. We’ve all heard this: it takes so long for the light from a faraway star to get here that it has happened that we see stars that have already died. The world, this world, our world is like the light from that dead star. It’s a ghost. It’s a confusion of time. The world has died, God has shrieked and repented and left his sorry invention. But we haven’t noticed yet. Inertia will kill us but not yet.

We’re living on afterburners. The world moves, the sun shines, the wind blows, people appear to love and laugh and live; but it’s all just the last thin fumes in the tank. The apocalypse has happened already. The apocalypse is history. We just missed it. But it will catch up with us.

It’s breathing down our necks.

SS