The Way the World Ends

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The Hollow Men

Mistah Kurtz — he dead

A penny for the Old Guy

~

This is the story of the way the world ends.

Mine, not yours. Don’t worry, this isn’t one of those stories about the world ending due to Nuclear Winter, zombie attacks, or an uprising against those who refuse to use Oxford commas (though that is one of the most heinous crimes one can commit).

Back to the way my world ended.

Okay, it didn’t really end. First, I suppose I should explain myself.

My name is Indigo, and I’m not an alcoholic. Nope, no drug problems, no teen pregnancy, no anorexia, no suicide attempts, no problems with my sexual identity. I don’t have any of the difficulties that those in my group therapy have. Unfortunately for me, going to the very thing that is supposed to make me better makes me feel worse. I’m not dyslexic, I’m not ADHD, I’m not OCD, I’m not any of those other things that have medical names. People try to give it a name. ‘The yips’, ‘the willies’, ‘general anxiety disorder’, etc. Maybe it is one of those things, but in my mind, I only think of it as the thing keeping me from the rest of my life. The rest of my world. It’s like locking eyes with a delicious chocolate cake, but every time you reach for the fork, your mouth watering, you’re struck with an immense feeling of panic like you’re falling backward off your chair over the edge of a giant cliff into a pool of hungry sharks. But the cake just looks so damn good you can’t help but try picking up that fork over and over again.

I’m not going to go into a long explanation of the way I am because that is all there is to it. I am me. As for the panic, it is what it is. We are separate and one. One cannot live without the other, and we can barely live together in the first place.

This is the way my world ends. Not necessarily in the way T.S. Eliot thought, but how my world of helplessness gave way to a brighter, better world. The way I got to eat the cake.

All thanks to a boy named Nate.