Although many predicted the end of the world, only a few thought it would come like this. The steel walls that surround us are adorned with colour. Images us to remind us of what once was. I touch a flat tree and try to imagine the feel of rough bark, as I did many years ago. But all I sense in my fingertips is a dull smooth chill. Earth is dying and we are the last.

A plague swept the world in 2020. While there were other events that came later far more befitting of the term apocalypse, that one was my first experience of the perils of pestilence. I was young at the time and we were on holiday. We had spent the week looking at so many palaces and museums, temples and statues, exhausted our senses to the point where everything, no matter how grand was starting to look alike. I don’t think anyone is supposed to take in that much art at once, least of all someone the age of my sister and I.

It was by chance we came upon a path that wove it’s way through a small forested area. The name of the artist whose work we stumbled upon I have long since forgotten. The art however, I do remember, because there under a dazzling sun, it was melting. In the densest part of this tiny urban wilderness stood, sat, and flew at least a dozen ice sculptures. From a delicate rope a fairy dangled, toes dripping shimmering droplets onto the head of a soon-to-be hornless unicorn. Nearby a man and a woman were locked in a passionate embrace, slowly melding into one. Beneath a tree, a racoon was loosing it’s strange frosted stripes.

“They’re melting!” I gasped, horrified that something so magical, so magnificent, something that must have taken hours to build, could wash away right before our very eyes.

“That’s what makes it so beautiful,” my mother had said as all of us stood transfixed.

I don’t think my mother considered the changes that occurred to the world in the days that followed quite so beautiful. There was a lot of cursing, a lot of phone calls. And even after we got home safe one night I saw her crying when she thought we were asleep. But beautiful or not, nothing lasts and those days too, eventually fell behind us.

Thirty years went by, another world war. One that thankfully barely touched our small paradise at the end of the Earth. It was the one that came after that really did the damage. And somewhere in the midst of it all I became a mother. It is on a beach that my memories find the most purchase. My children and I were making sandcastles when my husband ran down the hill with breaking news of his summons back to sea. My world might have crumbled then if not for a moment of oblivious child induced normalcy. Behind me my daughter squealed as my son drove his red-robed cavalry right into the middle of her sandcastle.

“It’s alright, some things aren’t meant to last. We can build a bigger one tomorrow.” I comforted the both of us as the sea licked at our heels.

My husband returned from that war as surely as the sea took our castle away the next day. Many others were less fortunate. Entire countries were wiped from the map and in their place new ones slowly sprang like daisies growing atop of a grave. We grieved and we grew. Not always for the better.

Rising sea levels, and increasingly unpredictable weather caused famine to coat the land only a few years later. A worldwide shortage of chocolate resulted in a fiery riot that rendered our town theatre into a pile of ash. Before it was even cold some neighbourhood kids used the charcoal from the smouldering remains to draw four fantastic free-running horses on the side of the Four square. It was a stunning piece of work, with every slither of mane and every glistening muscle painstakingly rendered. Drawn beneath what must have been nothing but the light from the moon. The supermarket owner hosed it down the very next afternoon.

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Prices of everything went up, air conditioning units sold out, companies collapsed, civilisations fell. Those that could, rode it out and from the dust that eventually settled, society slowly strengthened once more. Although it took on a very different shape from what it had going in, some portions of society lived on. Ships soon sailed the ocean again and not for the last time we turned our eyes back toward space.

Segments of technology lived on, some prospered more than they ever had before. Much of it was born out of our very need to survive, some our insatiable curiosity. The development of one dodged disaster resulted in a friendly AI which led to the cure of many diseases. Funding took a little longer and while we got there eventually it was a few months too late for my husband. I was sitting next to his bed reading to him the story of a sailor who set out to find the end of the earth, only to discover there wasn’t one. As I turned the last page he grabbed my hand and carefully slipped a necklace into it. To this day I don’t know where or how he came by it.

“To remember me by,” he said.

A small tarnished copper seahorse lay in my hand. Well-worn and all the more beautiful because of it. When I looked up again my husband was gone.

I thought his death was the last apocalypse I would ever live to see. I was wrong. Not only did I find love again with a green-eyen once-dark-haired vixen named ‘Jade,’ but in 2090 humankind finally discovered how to prevent aging.

It took until 2150 before we managed to turn back the clock on age itself and I got to see Jade’s natural hair colour. Preventative medicine became our new providence and disease no longer troubled the Earth like it once did. Wild winds still waged war but we had built bigger walls.

And a new theatre.

Jade and I spent many an evening painting up our own storm in a basement we’d built for our art. We created so many coloured canvasses we ran out of space. Some of it we sold. Some we painted over. Some we kept. Some got lost one summer when the basement flooded and I don’t even remember what they worlds they depicted. A few were sewn into the patched up sails of our little keel boat. Those ones I never forgot. No matter how many millions of years pass by. Somewhere in my mind the wind still tickles those scene-filled sheets.

The Earth is but a star in the black sky behind us now, a speck of dust. And the sun still visible burns brighter than ever. An ever increasing heat will boil the oceans before engulfing the planet in it’s entirety. We cannot stay any longer.

I touch the metal tree once more before stepping into my own sleep pod. No, that tree is nothing like the real ones and it will probably be long faded by the time we awake again. But it reminds me of what I have to look forward to on the soils of our new planet. This semblance of tree exists to be seen for such a short time and yet someone still thought to put it there. That thought is enough for me.

We live in so many moments, undefined by any single one, made whole by the pattern they make leaping through time and space. A wandering weave of chance and choice and loose threads reaching out into nothingness only sometimes finding purchase, often getting lost and torn but ever seeking nonetheless. Unique, colourful, and never still. We move forward now through the vast expanse of space on a ship sailing for a new world. Earth may be gone, but we continue.

Yes, many predicted the end of the world, but only a few thought it would ride right on by.