It's a foggy night. Eerie, misty. There's music playing on the radio, I'm not paying attention and I'm not talking. He doesn't look at me. I don't look at him. We're headed in the direction of my town, located over a hill and there's an orange glow on the horizon, filling up the atmosphere, bursting out in a contagious sprawl, filling the gaps in the urban decay. It reminds me of a great big fire, like I'm being driven towards an inferno, the biggest one yet. I'm almost drifting off to sleep, my head dropping every now and again, and I'm thinking. My mind's full of the idea of fire everywhere, consuming everything that I know as home. The place, the people, the memories. I think about how everything could just burn down, and I could be left in this car, driving sixty miles an hour in the direction of nothing. It makes me feel sad, desperate almost, the thought playing itself out in my mind. I think about everybody being gone from my town, the people that I've known and grown up with. I think about my animals, scared and alone, trying to escape but never really having a chance, and it almost brings me to tears, just thinking about it. It gets me thinking about all this talk of the end of the world, of everything. The apocalypse. That's such a crazy word for the end, but I guess if everything were to cease, it'd take something big, something crazy to make us all stop. Something like that deserves a big motherfucker of a word. I get to thinking about all these people that swear that the world's going to just end, someway, somehow in 2012. I brush it off a lot, the thought scares me when it gets under my skin. You just have to think though, about so many people out there, desperately trying to fix it, so certain that we'll all die in three and a half years. I guess they seem crazy, but what if they were right, sweetheart? Why shouldn't intelligent people have crazy ideas? Why shouldn't they be right sometimes? I hope I never know, I hope I never truly believe anything like that because it'd break my heart for nobody to ever believe me about anything ever again. I hate that frustration, that sick sense of knowing something where twenty other people in the room disagree, but in your heart, you desperately just know it's true, and you can't even begin to make them start to see the truth. I wouldn't be brave enough to have the whole world against me. It gets me thinking about what I've done, and what I'm doing. About how three and a half years seems like a seriously long time to do all the things that we really, genuinely want to do. But it's not really, is it? I have so many ideas about my life, but they're not solid, they're just ideas, nothing more. It'd take time to go through everything, more than three measly little years. I think about how eventually, that time might seem like much too long to have to wait, how it might just be enough to drive me crazy. Waiting on the end to come, knowing it's just right there and that there's nothing we can do to speed it up or to slow it down. We might just get distracted, with all that time, feeling like it's too long to just say 'fuck it' and to go crazy and do what it is we want to, how we have to wait just a little longer to take that leap. To go crazy, why is indulging ourselves so much like going crazy? We're always waiting. I'm thinking about how wonderful it actually is to live, when the only other alternative is death. If everything was taken away from us in a flash, and we were left to go on living, all we really have is ourselves. Each to their own. Our bodies don't lie, and we own them right to the core. I keep right on thinking about that, and how it'd be to know that soon we wouldn't even have that. Is that what getting old and knowing you're going to die soon feels like? Is there fear? Is it just about knowing your whole life that eventually you're going to die, and no matter what, you're going to go, and you're going to have to go alone? I must have been about six years old that one night, I lay in my bed, softly breathing, it was dark and getting late, and my little child's mind was whirring about life and death. I stumbled down the stairs and spent a long time crying to my mother about how I don't want to die. Where do we come to the point that it's okay to know it's going to happen? Does somebody pull a switch? How fucked up it must have felt for my mother, dealing with an infant so terrified of something that was never supposed to ever cross her threshold in her first few years. I do hope you're all wrong. I'm getting used to hanging about and flicking matches against the wall, the flames dying down in soft slow motion. That's how I'd like to go, too. Bright, but without consequence, slowly fading and insignificant.