a girl born on doomsday

Once upon a time there was a girl born on Doomsday.

Just as the end of the world came about, she came into existence, opening her eyes to skies on fire and buildings collapsing into piles of debris, drawing her first breath to ash and smoke-filled air, letting out her first scream to join the gut-wrenching symphony of a thousand other human souls crying out to the heavens for salvation, for survival, for hope.

But there was no hope to be found.

Except for her. The girl born on doomsday.

The lucky ones, the ones who survived – if you can call it survival – a ragtag group of a dozen shell-shocked people who were all that was left of a city of thousands, they pried her out of her mother’s dead hands and pulled her out of the half-collapsed hospital and took her away, into their tiny settlement on the outskirts of the city, saving her life against all the odds. That was where she grew up, from a tiny screaming baby to tiny screaming toddler to a quietly angry girl, who spent her childhood standing atop the ruined city buildings and staring out across the murky brown horizon, trying to imagine the world as it looked like in the stories that the adults told her of life before doomsday, but always eventually failing and resigning herself to the reality of the dirty air and dirtier skies and the brokenness of the world she’d been born into and that she’d never escape.

The world was a relic, something rusty and ruined and no longer functional, no longer able to support life as it once had. It had been destroyed well before the time she made her arrival on it. Other people, strange people, selfish people had ruined the world she was now forced to live on; where she was forced to breathe the ashy air and eat the meagre food and watch the other survivors die one by one as the food supplies dwindled and sickness swept through the ghost city with nothing to restrain it.

That was what made her angry. That was what made her, the silent, unsmiling, furious child of doomsday, stare out at the horizon day after day and grieve for a world she had never known.

They talked about her in the settlement; when they thought she wasn’t listening, when they thought she was too young to understand. They saw her as a beacon of hope: life, amongst so much death. A glimmer of promise amongst the desolation. A symbol of optimism for a brighter future. She was born on the day it happened, they said. Surely that means something? Surely it means she is special?

What if it means she will be the one to save us all?

The girl knew she was not special. She was simply an accident, a scrap of chance. Her birthdate meant nothing – if anything, it meant she was unlucky.

But humans cling onto hope even when there is none, and the survivors in the settlement were determined to cling onto her, even if she was the shakiest lifeline to ever exist. Even if she was just a little girl, with nothing extraordinary about her but the circumstances of her birth and her unlikely survival.

And she would be lying if she didn’t admit that, at times, she would lie awake on the hard earth floor under the tattered blanket and imagine that they were right: that she truly had arrived on the world to save it, to drag humanity back from the brink of extinction and bring light and optimism and joy back onto the planet.

But whenever she tried to imagine what she’d do to accomplish this, her mind would draw a blank, her imagination unable to conjure up a scenario where one single person could save an entire broken, haunted, empty world. What could she really do, apart from staring out at the horizon and hoping to survive another day? What could she do except pray that she would live to see a future that was better than everything she’d seen so far?

What could anyone really do, but cling onto the hope that tomorrow will bring something better than what the present moment holds?

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Andrea does freewriting and it turns out hella dark, part 2 

This is the first proper thing i've written in weeks and aahhh it feels so good to finally accomplish something!! I really hate writer's block, urghh.

Also just a sidenote, I'm thinking of changing my blog's URL to match my blog's new title, it's likely going to be endless-wonder-blog.blogspot.com and it should update automatically if you follow me through Blogger or email, but just in case it doesn't you might want to keep a note of that

> > Andrea