IT’S AN END OF THE WORLD STORY AND I HAVEN'T FALLEN IN LOVE YET
Photograph by Audrey Melton
I never liked the mundane.
As a kid, I thought that the regular string of predictable events that made up my everyday life were boring. In my eyes, waking up every morning in a regular room in a regular house in a regular suburban town was anything but exciting. Somehow, I had grown tired of normalcy despite barely being old enough to see a PG 13 movie in the theatre. I would ache for something to happen to rupture my routine and force me into the main character role of one of those dystopian end-of-the-world novels that I couldn't get enough of. I was obsessed with the formulaic and entirely predictable stories that involved teenage characters waking up one morning to a world where everything had changed. An asteroid strikes or aliens invade and two 16 years olds are forced to save the world from itself while simultaneously falling in love with each other. One of my hobbies was scanning the library aisles for books that had the little blue spaceship sticker on its spine- a promise that I would find a cheesy love story disguised as a post-apocalyptic novel within its pages that would thrill me and make me emotional all at once. I think a lot of us grew up on those stories. Stories like The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner and Divergent that defined our early adolescence and laid the blueprint for a generation that's obsessed with living a life that is more exciting than the 9-5 desk job that previous generations would like us to strive for. I don’t think we ever wanted routine. We wanted excitement and adventure.
My favourite phrase was ‘something I'd never done before’ and I used it constantly. I'd tell my parents that for lunch, I'd want something I'd never had before and I wanted to drive somewhere I'd never been before and I’d wanna meet someone I'd never met before. I was always in search of this hypothetical life that involved new things and a constant rush of adrenaline. But it never happened. Eventually I accepted the fact that my regular suburban life would have to satiate me for now and that I was too old to wish that my life was a movie. So I went to school, went to parties and did normal teenage things in my normal suburban town.
But then, around March of 2020, normal didn’t exist anymore.
All of a sudden, life was scary and uncertain and nobody knew what to do. A ‘new normal’ emerged that consisted of masks and lockdowns and 6 feet and missed proms and birthdays.
We began to live in a new world where lockdown requires us to be all alone but at the same time finding ways to be more connected than ever. Seeking human contact through happy hour zoom calls and parking lot hangouts. Where we are trying our best to keep it together as we live in our heads because there is nowhere else to go.
As I ache to return to normalcy, I think about what that younger version of myself would think if she saw me now. In a world that is entirely turned upside down and anything but normal. Where politicians’ favourite phrase is unprecedented times. In a world that is not thrilling and exciting like I expected, but the opposite. It’s boring and tireless and a little bit frightening. Life is divided into the before and the after.
The old version of me was naive and didn’t understand that the part that was unrealistic about her end of the world novels was not the actual catastrophic event but the way that everybody seemed to know exactly what to do afterwards. Because we’re trying our best to navigate this new world and it reminds me of a twisted version of a guessing game that we used to play when we were kids. I have a feeling that if the younger version of me knew what was coming, she would put that book with the spaceship on the spine back on the shelf and forget everything she thought she wanted and thank god for her regular life in her regular suburban town.
I think that the generation that was raised on end-of-the-world stories have become a cautionary tale of sorts. Teaching others to be careful about what they wish for because now, we’re in an end-of-the-world story except the credits never seem to roll and we haven't fallen in love yet because human contact is frowned upon when we’re ordered to stay six feet apart.