Doomsday

Hi everyone,

Below is my creative project/ short story.

Have a great holiday!

– Priya

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I wake up and drag myself out of bed as I have for the past six months. It is mid-December and my frozen apartment in Hamilton Heights is pitch black as it always is at two in the morning or at night or what ever. I shuffle across of the tiny part of my bedroom floor that isn’t covered in dirty clothes and trash to make my way to the kitchen. I, then, place a kettle filled with water onto the stove with the all the energy I could gather.
I saw the blue fire of the burning gas and wished I could muster up the courage to throw myself into it. I want the flame to grow and engulf the house and me and everything I knew. And then there were no more thoughts. Those are all the thoughts I ever have. This is how it has been for six months, or for as long as I can remember.

I imagined the end of the world filled with life. I envisioned a noble, dignified end to life on my mother planet. After eons of turmoil and life and fire everything is growing cold. There are no volcanoes or forest fires here; the Earth is a dying ember. I wish it would burst into flames and I wish it would take me with it. I imagined, mankind and its carbon-based kin, crying, screaming, and fighting the elements of nature to its last breath.

I dreamt of fire and brimstone, hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, and the Messiah Himself with His Sword of Death. The end I yearned for is covered in fabulous destructive colors dancing together to bring chaos to the world like the stars in Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”
I feel cheated.
Stuffing my feet into a pair of slippers, I stumbled out of my apartment in my pajamas and a torn winter coat. I take the tasteless instant coffee I just brewed with me in a hopeless attempt to keep myself awake.
“Today will be the day,” I tell myself. And with that I find the strength to walk.
We were promised an Apocalypse that was to be a grand finale— like a super nova— like the death of some bright being that we would all mourn if that ending was not as spectacular as it was. No one told me that the Earth would meet its end more like a dwarf star; no one told me that we would fade away by turning into black holes. I want to bleed before I die. I want to feel before I die. We are not dying; actually, we are just turning grey. I am turning to stone as I breathe.

I see this world and I remember my grandfather who stood about six feet and four inches tall in his prime. He had jet-black hair, honey-toned Indian skin, and huge sparkling eyes in old sepia pictures from before the Second World War and my grandmother’s memories as she related them in Baldwin, New York. But I remember as he shriveled into a deaf, blind, scaly grey ball –like an armadillo—before he died at ninety-seven. If humans tend to turn grey and die rather uneventfully in old age, why do we expect anything else of our world? I never want to be ninety-seven. I don’t want to see tomorrow.
Everything is grey and has been for months. Under the dim streetlights, the bricks are grey, the trees are grey, the streets are grey, and my thoughts are grey. Every drop of color in New York City has been drained into the Hudson River.
As I walk towards Broadway in this section of Harlem, all of the world’s waters join to make one murky brown-grey cesspool, but it doesn’t matter to me anymore because my senses are too dull to care.
Sometimes I wonder if I am seeing the end of Times, or just the end of my world. Everywhere I go, the streets are deserted and when they are not, I feel absolutely no connection to the souls that pass me. Actually, I wonder if I care for anyone else anymore. I wonder if I care anymore.
Any thought that passes through my mind these days involve killing myself or killing others. Today I dream of hospital beds, dialysis, blood, and morgues and yesterday I dreamt of tombs. Last night I dragged my tired feet through the fresh mud of the neighborhood cemetery until I couldn’t walk anymore—then I crawled until I fell asleep in front of a tombstone.
These thoughts, and these actions, were for the most part involuntary but they exist and are very real. I tell myself over and over again that the world really is ending, that the skies really are colorless, that it’s not just me, and that the End really is here. I’d rather be morbid or dead, anything, than insane.
I am Death in her grey coat but I guess I am also the dying. I am a female Messiah, or the goddess Kali; I am here to wreak havoc and save the world from this dull, dry, grey nothingness or save myself at the very least. Then again, us Hindus believe that Kalki—the tenth avatar of Vishnu—will come to the world and destroy everything so that we may all be reborn to start the cycle all over again.
All of a sudden suicide seems hopeless and for some reason this manages to make me even more depressed than I possibly ever could be. I wonder, if I can have a cohesive story without hope and if there is hope in death. Actually, there are the only thoughts I’ve had in months. There is some perverted comfort in planning out one’s suicide.
My name is Pratiksha. My parents named me Pratiksha, which is derived from the word for hope in Sanskrit. I wonder if they remembered that Sanskrit is a dead language that only the priests were allowed to speak. I wonder if they know that I am atheist.
After walking downhill for what seemed like a few miles I was finally at the edge of the Hudson River in Riverside Park around the 145th Street entrance. The air is so cold and thick that I feel as if I could drown without even touching the water. I am ready to throw myself at the last bit of color left in this world, into the water, into this brown mess. I close my eyes and pray to that nonexistent God. With another stroke of courage, I take off my coat and jump.
And then I jumped. In the shock I knew that my conscience was leaving my own body to take refuge above my head and out of the water. I somehow managed to throw myself into an enclosed area of the river.
I saw myself drowning in the freezing water and I felt the needles prick my lungs. I was heavy, I was sinking, I was—
I heard sirens the ear-piercing sirens and flashing red and blue lights.
I was still conscious.
“Ma’m, we’re coming to get you,” a voice shouted. It was a police officer and his partner managed to jump into the water. And I remembered nothing else until I woke up here in a hospital room.
I found myself in a consulting room in what, I assumed, was a hospital. There was a security guard who was twice my size at the door and I had been stripped and stuffed into a hospital gown. I was on four-point restraints. I couldn’t have moved if I tried.
I’ve lived through this so many times that I knew what came next. A nervous young psychiatric resident in his thirties came into the room. What followed was so scripted that I knew his lines by heart.
“How are you doing?” He asked.
“I’m okay,” I said automatically.
“Now, I’m going to have to ask you a few questions…” He kept talking.
And I drowned out his voice as I always do because I’ve been here before and I’ll probably be here again.
“What is your name?” He asks.
“Pratiksha” I say.
“Do you know where you are?”
“I have no clue” and I really didn’t.
“Well, you’re at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in Washington Heights” he said, “who is the president of the United States?”
“Barrack Obama.”
“Do you know the date?”
“No”
“Do you know how you got here?”
“On an ambulance?”
“Do you hear any other voices in this room besides mine and your own?”
“No, do you think I’m insane?” I ask. I hate that question.
“No, but you did seem to attempt suicide tonight, and we will have to keep you under observation tonight at the very least.” He answered. “Can you spell ‘world’ for me?”
“W-O-R-L-D” I said, “and what good will that do?”
“Well, we’ll keep you here till your urge to kill yourself passes.” He said, “Can you spell ‘world’ backwards?”
“D-L-R-O-W,” I say, “what if it never passes?”
“It never, never passes” he chuckled like a nervous schoolgirl. Perhaps it was too much coffee or sleep deprivation, but he seemed pretty grey himself too.
“I’ve been this way since I was nine” I said.
He ignored me.
“Now I’m twenty.”
“I’ll put you on lithium,” he said.
“What if I’ve been on lithium for years, then what?” I asked.
“You’ll feel better eventually, there are other medicines you can try.”
“And what if nothing works?” I ask.
“Something will,” he says annoyed.
“I’ve been living in hell for eleven years, why should anything change now?” I asked.
He didn’t answer and, with that, he left me with the staring security guard and the four-point restraints.
As always, as soon as the sun peaked out of the clouds in the dull morning sky and shed its garish light on this imperfect, disgusting city I was discharged with a sample-pack of antidepressants. I made sure to toss them into the dumpster as I made my way towards the 168th street subway station.
Isn’t it humane, I wonder, to keep people alive past when they probably should have faded away? Is it fair to keep them in this purgatory? What are the ethics of emotional life support? My life is hopeless and all this is hopeless. I died the moment I learned I could escape life.
I dragged myself into my fourth floor walkup and fell asleep.
The alarm clock rings, it’s two in the morning.
I wake up and drag myself out of bed as I have for the past six months. It is mid-December and my frozen apartment in Hamilton Heights is pitch black as it always is at two in the morning or at night or what ever. I shuffle across of the tiny part of my bedroom floor that isn’t covered in dirty clothes and trash to make my way to the kitchen. I, then, place a kettle filled with water onto the stove with the all the energy I could gather.
Stuffing my feet into a pair of slippers, I stumbled out of my apartment in my pajamas and a torn winter coat. I take the tasteless instant coffee I just brewed with me in a hopeless attempt to keep myself awake.
After walking downhill for what seemed like a few miles I was finally at the edge of the Hudson River in Riverside Park around the 145th Street entrance. I am ready to throw myself at the last bit of color left in this world, into the water, into this brown mess.