Dear Journal,

Oh my god, yesterday (and it actually was yesterday, I decided that I’m going to try to be good about actually writing every day, although you never know so no promises, but you’ll never know anyway!) I got done writing, and I realized that I didn’t even tell you actually what happened to start the apocalypse! Just that the bombs dropped and that mom’s coffee shop was actually in a bomb shelter.

So, what happened was that the bombs started dropping while I was at work, right? And I’ll be honest, it was kind of a sucky Saturday anyway, because I’d already had two people yell at me about not getting their orders right, which was like not my fault because one of them was mumbling, which how am I supposed to be able to take your coffee order when you’re mumbling?? And the other was kind of my fault, but I didn’t know that the bottom of that coffee pot had been scorched, so she got what she asked for, but she still yelled at me for serving her gross burned coffee, which I literally didn’t even mean to do. So anyway, it was a rough Saturday.

My dad was out of the house - probably playing golf? I don’t know, he didn’t leave a note, but he’s a total golf dad, so if he’s not in the house, we kind of just assume that he’s out golfing. Or at least I assume that, I don’t know what my mom assumes because she seemed like she was pissed with him like half the time and I never knew why, so maybe there was something else going on. But either way, he was out of the house. But when he did stay home on Saturdays, he would often help my mom with her coffee shop, which was already great because that meant that I could actually go and hang out with my friends. But since he wasn’t in the house today, it meant that I had to be at the coffee shop. And it meant that I was at the coffee shop like every second of my life.

So anyway, my dad was out somewhere probably golfing, which meant that my mom and I were at the coffee shop. So I was making coffee for this regular that comes in like ten times a day and always wants this super complicated order, so I wasn’t paying attention to much else, when all of a sudden it sounded like everyone’s phones started ringing at once. Even mine, which was super crazy because I never even put a ringer on mine because I didn’t want it to like go off at school and then have one of the teachers confiscate it or something. But my mom was like right next to me when all this happened, and she always gets super pissed if I’m on my phone when I’m supposed to actually be working, so I kept trying to focus on Mr. Regular’s order while everyone around me kept getting louder and louder. Finally, I got done putting in the billion pumps of syrup that the guy always asks for, and I turned around and he wasn’t even there. So rude - luckily my mom had seen what happened so she wouldn’t think it was something I did and then dock my pay for it, which she has totally done before, and then I’d have to have dad pay for more of my clothes, which he was always kind of pissed about.

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But really, when I turned around, like half of the people who were usually there weren’t there anymore. It was like they had all gotten some big announcement that a celebrity was in town or something, and some of them didn’t even bother to pick up their purses to bring with! I was all busy being worried about how we were going to find the people who left their stuff and how much of a pain it would be to keep everything separated when I noticed just how freaked out that everyone who was still in the coffee shop seemed to be. Like for real, they weren’t acting at all a celebrity had come to town. They were all like crying and trying to call people, which made no sense to me. I turned to my mom to ask her what everybody’s problem was, and that’s when I noticed that she was crying too. That was totally the craziest thing of all - I’ve never seen my mom cry, not even when she was sick or when she and my dad had had a huge fight. She always said that when the going gets tough, she had to get tougher, but there she was, with water running down her face like it was its job. So crazy.

And that’s when she told me the world was ending.

Oh my god, Kayla, you’re probably thinking, the world totally didn’t even end. I mean, you’re here. I’m here. The coffee shop is still here. That may not be the world I wanted, but it’s still a world, right? Which like, yeah, but like, how am I supposed to go to the mall with my friends if there’s no mall and all the people that I thought were my friends were dead?

So like I said yesterday, what happened was that some big bad dictator guy decided that if he didn’t get exactly what he wanted, then he might as well destroy the world. Which in a way, I get, because that’s totally something that I might have said before all of this, but like, I wouldn’t ever actually do it, you know? Who is actually crazy enough to destroy the world they live in? They need it to live still, duh!

But anyway, when our government found out that they had decided to bomb us, they decided to bomb them back because obviously they wanted to be the ones with the last word. That didn’t really matter to us, because we were already in the path of the first bomb and all, but still kind of a dick move in my opinion. But then, they decided that the best course of action would be to tell everyone that they were about to die, because when people are already panicking, obviously telling them that they’re going to die is going to help that. I guess it was good, because maybe some people go to say goodbye to their loved ones and whatever, but it didn’t really work with the phone lines, because everyone was busy trying to make calls, so nobody could actually make calls. But if you happened to be in the same location, at least you could like get a hug or something.

I just wish, for me personally, that they hadn’t sent that out, because then I had to deal with my mom crying, which was not something that I was equipted to do, especially at the end of a long shift, and especially while dealing with my own mortality. Kind of a fucked up move for them, on my part.

So my mom was crying, and I don’t think I was really processing it well because it’s so weird of a thing to get told just in the middle of your day, so I just kind of stood there as my mom wrapped her arms around me and cried into my shoulder. I know now that I probably should have like soothed her or something, but that just feels really weird to do to your mom.

I’m out of room here, so I’ll tell you more about it tomorrow.

Love,

Kayla