The End

Lydia Miller '21

In my last moments there was pressure, then darkness.

Shortly before, a tall, solemn man with black suit and a briefcase slowly walked up my front steps. I knew he was coming to tell me that my brother had died or gone missing in the war. I refused to believe it.

Then there was a flash and the pressure and the darkness. There was no time for alarms or to get under cover, just the weight of my home and darkness.

Three weeks prior, I had finally convinced my parents to flee north and let me stay and wait for him. They reluctantly left, and although I was an adult, they could not bear to lose another child to the war. They knew I wanted to enlist and fight with my brother for democracy and liberty but they also knew that we were up against half of the US military, and every white supremacist backed by China and Russia.

At this point, we had the diplomatic support of the EU and many other nations, but none of them had the military capacity to help much. I heard Germany was sending over more reinforcements to support the union perimeter that had been established around Washington, Oregon, California and Nevada, but part of me knew it would not hold long. In the end though, none of that mattered. What mattered was that I was scared and alone and felt like a child.

What mattered was the man and the light and the blast and the weight and the darkness.

Many, many months before that, I heard my brother’s heavy boots in the middle of the night, slowly tiptoeing down the stairs and towards my room. I knew he was leaving to fight. I knew everything that went on behind my brother’s beautiful eyes—no words needed to be said.

He opened my door and I stayed still, pretending to sleep, but the tears were already flowing. I could not stop him. His bags were packed, and his mind was made up. He kissed me on the forehead, and I sat up.

“I know I don’t need to explain anything, I can’t really explain anything, but I know that you know this is what I need to do. I can’t just sit here and do nothing waiting for the war to be over or to be killed. I would rather die trying to save those who can no longer save themselves.”

I forced a soft “I know” and hugged him.

I was the only one he said goodbye to, which was difficult for my parents. I know parents say they don’t have a favorite, but how could he not be the favorite. I never told them that he said goodbye to me; I think it would just make matters worse.

Not much of anything crossed the union perimeter, so I heard from my brother exactly seven times in the one year, two months and five days since he left. The last time I heard from him, he was in Texas fighting with the groups that somehow managed to hold the larger cities, arranging for the evacuation of the people and supplies back west.

None of that really mattered anymore, because there I was standing in the window, watching the man dressed in black walk up my front steps, then the flash of a bomb, and the split second of recognition, and the bone shattering wave of force and the pressure, but worst of all, the darkness.

It was a blackness that surrounded me, that infiltrated my very being and sucked the soul out of my crushed body. It was numb and cold and heavy—the most beautifully and horribly blank nothingness—but somehow I was still me.

Before that, we were oblivious of what was to come. We were lying in the grass on the fourth of July at 11:57, just minutes before my brother would leave his teenage years. The sound of skateboards clattering, our friends laughing, and fireworks being shot created an odd background to the somber space the two of us were in.

“Growing up is a strange thing,” he said.

I looked at the stars. “Yeah. I still feel like a little kid.”

“Maybe we always just feel like kids because we have just always felt like ourselves. Our whole selves have always been there, it’s just now we have the words to express them.”

In the end that was all that mattered. Even in death, with the weight of my home crushing my already shattered body and an unfathomable blank blackness gripping me and tearing me away, I was still me, and had always been, and always will be.