The End of the World in Her Eyes

When somebody dies, you always hear about the light leaving their eyes, but all I saw in her eyes was the brightest blast of white light. I was watching the sun explode. I saw nothing but white fiery light rushing towards us, and it was the most devastatingly beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Not only did I see my entire world in her eyes, but I saw the exact moment that my entire world was ending.

The sun was coming straight at us, and we knew it was. That’s why we decided to come out here anyway. We came to our spot, laying among the stars on a grassy field that felt so remote, none of the light from the city could pollute the endless sea of stars in the sky above us. All we wanted was to be together when we knew the world was ending. I wanted her to be the last person I spoke to, held, kissed, and saw as I died. I would never again get the chance to hold her and tell her that I would find her wherever I could. In the afterlife, in the world beyond our own, I would go searching anywhere and everywhere until I found her again.

There’s no way to prepare for the end of the world, no matter how many times they try to tell you. We knew that things were getting bad when governments were being shut down, plagues and pandemics running rampant across the world. Food was getting so expensive that people stopped buying it so people stopped making it. Crops went bad, we were at the height of a climate crisis, and no one knew what to do. People stopped working, they stopped going out, it felt like entire cities, states, and countries were rotting away. We knew this was going to happen, and we still let it happen. They warned us over a decade ago that if we didn’t start taking care of the Earth, the Earth would stop taking care of us. And that’s exactly what happened.

By the time it got really bad, there was no undoing the work that was already done. No amount of recycling, donating, or care in the world could fix the problem that we created. Now, we were going to be the ones to pay for it. I remember when the news first hit, that famous headline reading “Scientists say the world will end indefinitely within the next 10 years”. Everyone thought it was some sick joke, or some form of fearmongering to get us to care about the state of the planet again. But soon after that first headline and hundreds of others displayed everywhere, we saw the effects of it happening in real time. All across the globe, we were hit with an unimaginable heat wave that had no end in sight. It was so strong that people had to completely abandon once-livable desert areas like Las Vegas, Arizona, Egypt and more, with the temperatures reaching as high as 250 degrees almost daily. It dried up natural water sources to the point where all forms of marine life had almost gone completely extinct. There was no way to avoid it, so rather than escaping our end, they tried to prepare us for it.

They told us that the sun was going to explode. When it happens, it will be just over eight minutes before we feel anything from the blast. We might see it coming towards us, like a bomb detonating in the night, but since light takes so long to travel, we wouldn’t feel the heat or the radiation until it was too late. Once those eight minutes are up, everything on Earth, every piece of humanity, would be vaporized instantly. All of human life and life on Earth would be scattered into the void, and we’ll all be gone. It wasn’t until this information was shared that panic started to really set in among the general public, and people were preparing what they called “Underground Sun Shelters” in an attempt to save themselves from our impending doom. Which all felt really silly because if they paid any attention, going underground didn’t mean you’d be safe, it still meant you would get hit, just by a few seconds later.

As soon as I heard the news, I was met with a wide range of emotions, but mostly anger. I didn’t have enough time with the love of my life. We met each other in the third grade on the playground and I remember going home to tell my parents that very same day that I found the girl that I was going to marry. We've been inseparable ever since. We were both just 20 years old now, and we weren’t ever going to get the chance to build a life together. I would never get the chance to propose, go out and drink with friends, move in together, have a child, buy our first house together, grow old together. All of that was stripped away from us because we were too selfish to take care of a world that would be around to see it. But we didn’t have time for that to upset us. Rather than focusing on everything we wouldn’t get to experience, I wanted to make sure that the girl I loved was happy and content in her last few moments on Earth. There wasn’t a way for us to tell when the explosion was going to happen, so we tried our best to treat every day like our last.

One evening, we shared some food we’d scrounged up in our favorite spot out on the fields. The time between the sunset and nightfall were the most tolerable, so we always made it a point to sit outside and enjoy every bit of nature that we could before it was all gone.

“You know what I think upsets me the most about the end of the world?” she asked, looking into the far off distance of the field, right where the sun was beginning to set.

“Tell me” I said, brushing a strand of hair out of her face and behind her ear.

“There won’t be anyone around to remember us. Remember all of this,” she said, gesturing to everything around us. “No one to hear our stories, learn of our histories. Admire our accomplishments or learn from our failures. Everything will be gone, like it was never here. None of us were here. What was this all for, then?”

She looked down at the piece of bread in her hand, and I could tell that this thought was starting to weigh heavy on her mind. I loved her mind. She always said the things that everyone was thinking but no one wanted to say. She wanted to learn why everything was the way that it was, why people thought and felt a certain way, she wanted to pick your brain with a fine-toothed comb and then ask you about every little bit of it. Her drive and curiosity were some of the things I loved most about her. It made me a bit sad knowing that she would never get the chance to find all of the answers that she’d been seeking.

I took a deep breath and grabbed her hand.

“I think that the point of all of this was for us to realize that we are our beginning and our end. Humans have this innate ability to create something from nothing, whether it's an idea, an invention, anything. Some of the most beautiful things we get to experience on this Earth were created by humans, like art, books, technology, architecture. Hell, even little baby humans! And we get to feel! We get to feel so many things, and all of it can be so beautiful. But humans can also take. We can take things from one another, take things for granted, take from the Earth, we can even take a life, and all of that can be…challenging. It can be scary. We can create and take and experience so many things within a lifetime. We can love, we can laugh, we can cry, we can take, we can hurt, but really, all of it is in our hands. We let this happen to ourselves, and I feel like we forget that. All we had to do was take care of the Earth and we would be okay, but we didn’t. We got selfish, we got lazy, and now we pay the price for it. So yeah, when we go, our stories and our histories, our accomplishments and our failures and everything in between will go with us too. But there was so much humans did get to do. Maybe you and I didn’t get enough time, but I think maybe in some weird and twisted way, this is the universe letting us go. Now we can be little specks of dust in the atmosphere and maybe one day we can watch the beauty of it all happen again.”

She looked into my eyes and a sad smile started spreading across those lips that I love so much. Before I knew it, she grabbed my face with both hands and kissed me. We stayed like that for a while, until we were both laying on our backs, holding hands as we stared up into the night sky pointing at stars.

“If we’re going to be specks of dust in the atmosphere, I hope I at least shine bright enough like a star,” she said.

I propped myself up on my elbow and turned on my side so that I could look into her eyes. “I don’t think that’s a problem you’ll have to worry about,” I replied. I inched closer to take a better look into her eyes, the ones I get lost in every single time. It felt like time warped and slowed down all at once. Right in the middle of her pitch black pupils I could see the faintest white light, and it was getting bigger and brighter with each passing second. The light was growing, and it was at that very moment that I knew it was happening. It was here.

I didn’t want to look away because there was no point. I didn’t feel the heat yet, I knew I had a couple of minutes before that would hit. All I wanted to think of and see was her. Watching the sun explode within the pupils of her eyes, my first and only truest love, and having that be the last thing I see on this Earth before the world ends, that’s all I could ever ask for. She is my entire world, and I am watching my world end in her eyes. It is the most shockingly beautiful thing I have and will ever see.