I want to watch the end of the world.

Not a common sentiment, I get it. The end of the world is a contentious topic, after all (haha) and not many people want their lives to collapse out from under them, maybe even kill them. Probably even kill them, let's be honest here. "But M," you're probably thinking, "What about all the people who'll die? Don't you care at all about them?"

I know, I know, I was built wrong. Always have been. There's a little part of me where that hurt should be: all that thinking about other people's pain and being upset about it. I know it exists because I see it in other people. But for me? It's empty. Almost, anyway. Always has been. That's what I mean by built wrong. I care about family, friends, and that's about it. Anyone else's pain just kind of bounces off me, whoosh, even if it's right there and the people around me are bawling their eyes out. It's a bit surreal, really.

On the whole, I kind of love being different. Having a mind that works sideways like this. That missing empathy, though, that's more annoying than anything. Like, imagine trying to make and keep friends because you really want friends, but whenever one of them starts crying, you've got no idea what to do. And I don't mean like, "I'm awkward and bad at comforting you because I'm out of practice." I mean like, "I literally do not feel your pain, but you are my friend and I've watched enough people to know I need to respond to this," except you were born without the software package, for like, basic human exchanges of emotion.

So you're left running some kind of mental algorithm to respond, trained on watching other people, only that algorithm is six versions out of date because you can only update so many parts of it at once, and the input feed is broken, so you're not even sure what's a good outcome of your intervention. More crying, or less? I don't even know, man. I try, because life is a lot easier and feels a lot better when you can understand other people, but it's so fucking hard. One more reason to look forward to the eventual future when animals will inherit the earth we tore away from them in the first place.

And that'd be cool, you know? To be a ghost for that, because yeah, I probably wouldn't survive it, either, and these things happen on geological timescales. After all the horror and destruction—after The Fall—it'd be cool to watch the earth recover. To watch all of humanity's arrogance crumble back into the soil and the sea, until the ecosystems heal and there's nothing left of us but a thin line in the strata and maybe a few fossilized pieces of fishing gear.

I wonder what you'd have to do to be a ghost for that long. To be a ghost at all. X wonders about this a lot, and it's fun to read about, even if they never really explore parts of it because they're too scared. I'd be lying if I said I'm not scared—the end of the world still terrifies me—but there's also a certain thrill in it, you know? I come alive in apocalypse situations. And I don't know that because I've been in one, not really, but I've dreamed plenty. Lucid dreaming. I know how I react.

And if you think that's messed up, yeah, it is. I know that. But so's this world, and there comes a point when you've got a choice when facing it: either you piss yourself in fear and shut down, or you accept that this is your future and cope with it however you can. Turn it into humor, wonder, some kind of game. Bet on what will break first. Prod the morbid corners of things like the beauty that grows from the ruins of society. Marvel at the absurdity of people going about their days like everything's fine. That's the biggest lie our world will tell you. That everything will be fine.

Haha. I wonder sometimes if I'm even human. Humans don't respond well when you say these kinds of things, even if you justify them. Well, not justify; explain. I'm not justifying the end of humanity, or why there's a part of me that's missing that makes it hard for me to feel empathy. Even if I want to. That part doesn't change—believe me, X has tried. And it leaves me wondering sometimes who I am, what I am, and yeah, whether I'm even human. People stopped treating me like one so long ago, I gave up trying. Easier to be yourself. Less exhausting. And it filters out the ones you wouldn't have wanted to hang out with anyway.

And there are definitely some advantages to being even-keeled. It's easier to manipulate people, and I don't mean that in a bad way. Not really. I mean, chronic manipulators are terrible, but there's a thousand practical applications for a bit of the skill. Goes hand in hand with lying. Sometimes you just need to flatter people, or tell a little white lie. Sometimes a group works better when you take control and make everyone feel like they're making a valuable contribution. Even if they're not. Sometimes you've just gotta assign the useless person to cultivating duckweed.

And sometimes manipulation is a kind of protection, too. Crafting yourself into a different image without losing who you are is a form of manipulation. That's one thing X is terrible at. Not the crafting part, the losing part. They just straight-up become other people. And then it's up to me to drag them back again, always the pessimist, always the cautious and wary one. No points for guessing who'd keep us alive in a survival situation. Sometimes you've gotta be wary, y'know? Sometimes you've gotta manipulate yourself into a group for real or social survival. Sometimes you've got to lie.

Or to stop caring, because you've only got so much emotional energy to start with, and if you spread it too broadly, you crash. X always thinks we've got way more than we do, so I'm the one who puts controls on it. They kind of hate me for that. But they hate me because they know I'm right.

You know what else is manipulation? Intimidation. You know what's fun? Staring at would-be bullies until they go away. Those kinds of people don't know what to do with you when you don't react.

Yeah, X, you know which of us got us through elementary school without being bullied, even though we had every reason to be? Sure wasn't you, buddy.

And yeah, I said fun. There's something about those kinds of situations that feels... cracked. Like the light around you is ~off~ somehow, cracking into iridescence, like you're seeing the world through broken glass. It makes the fractures between reality and Reality a little more apparent. Like when you go off the social script people are expecting you to adhere to, and end up hacking the system. Or when people become so convinced of a belief that they lose all grounding in reality, get destabilized, and cling harder to their conviction to cope. When celebrities crack under pressure, and spiral. When natural or human disaster reveals a system so breathtakingly broken that the only way to fix it is to tear it down.

That's what I mean with the end of the world, really. The first thing to go will reveal all those cracks. Strip away this grand game of pretend that humanity and society plays, and finally let us grapple with the reality that everyone seems bent on ignoring. That'll be a breath of fresh air. Real reality is so much harsher, but oh my god, it makes so much more sense than whatever fucked-up social system we've got right now.

That's why I like the cracks, really. There's something about them, because they're real. So much more real than anything we pretend is our reality here. And I know they're ugly—far uglier than our constructed reality—but I crave them. They're shiny, and they fascinate me, and I can't look away.

***

The leaves come falling, one by one

For they must know their time has come

For they are tired, old, and weak

Their brittle sides like bones do creak

The darkness now is falling here

The wintertime is drawing near

As like the setting of the sun

The leaves come falling, one by one