Madness

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. When I look at my past self, I see a stranger, reeking with the purity and ignorance of youth. She worried little, and laughed often. Her heart was fragile and her ego was huge. She exists still, but only in memory.

This world ended and a new one began. A world, in which purity, stupidity, and weakness got you killed. Or worse. This once happy-go-lucky, clueless girl was forced to open her eyes, and see the world that had been left to her.

First came the drought. For two years, not a drop of rain fell on the earth. People fought over the water that remained. Once that was gone, we started losing all of our other resources. Many plants and animals died off because of dehydration, and many more were taken by the wild fires.

Food shortages made rationing necessary for the countries that were structured enough to enforce it. And for those that couldn’t, civil war, anarchy, and chaos followed. Hundreds of millions died all over the world.

Then came the epidemic. A plague unlike anything I’d ever seen. It came quick and silent, taking thousands in the first night alone. It would start with a fever that would last a few hours. Then your veins would turn black, and blood would run from most of your orifices. By that point, it would only be a few minutes before the body shut down and you stopped breathing. Boarders shut down, and quarantineand curfews were enforced. I came to understand that people don’t like to be caged, even for aims of safety. Violence ensued as more and more people got sick.

By this point, in America, most government leaders had abandoned their posts and sought solitary refuge in their private underground bunkers. The military came in and essentially took control. They told us that the President was giving orders from a remote location, but no one actually knew if that was true. All we knew was that the world as we’d known it was dead.

Now, all I could do was close my eyes and think back to how simple my life had been before the madness. How, in the morning, I would wake up and eat breakfast with my sister and our parents, then go to school. I missed school. I missed my friends. I missed my car and my puppy and even Mrs. Paulson. Who knew what happened to her?

I closed my eyes, head dropping, like a person drunk for so long she no longer knows she's drunk, and then, drunk, awoke to the world which lay before me.