If I’m being perfectly honest, I don’t know what else to do. The sea is rising and so is the temperature. 836,000 people have died from COVID in America, and 5.48 million have died worldwide. In 2021 there were only 15 days when the police in America didn’t kill anyone, and 98.3% of killings by police since 2013 have not resulted in officer’s being charged with a crime. If you go to the emergency room, it could bankrupt you. It costs about $39.95 to hold your baby after you give birth in a hospital. The total student debt in America is over $1.59 trillion dollars, while we spend over $750 billion annually on the military, meanwhile 50% of Americans are living with medical debt, which is up from 46% in 2020.
What I’m saying is that it’s possible things have already fallen apart, and that I’ve spent my whole life watching it. And I think the only reasonable response to this is to write about love. Our government collects our taxes and watches us die and laughs when we beg for help. We’ve seen over a year and a half of communities rising up in mutual aid because, while the people we elect to protect us don’t give a fuck if we die, it turns out that we, all of us, very much do. So I write about love, because it’s the only thing I think really matters.
Every day I get up, and I shower, and I gently wake my partner while she sleeps, and I make coffee, I work remotely, we eat lunch, we think about dinner, we cook dinner, we go for a walk, we watch a movie, we tuck each other in, our hopes and dreams send mixed messages as we sleep, and then we get up, and do it all over again. I mean of course the world is ending. What else was it going to do? There’ve been, what, five extinction-level events on the planet that we have evidence of? So I write about love. I write about what it’s like to eat a big dinner with the people you love, to see in them the things we love about them over and over and over, watching their eyes light up, feeling our hearts stretch out to encompass all of this, the spark every time hands touch, a full belly, a smile; this is, at the end of the day, what we can live for: love and beauty and wonder. We lift each other up, we share our dreams, we watch them change, our dreams, we watch them dream new dreams, we watch the world fall apart around us, we watch California burn every summer, the fires are broadcast to our phones by our friends phones over the internet, which is, as yet, unincorporated by the state. The other day it snowed for the first time all winter, and Prospect Park was full of children, crying with joy, on sleds, hurling snowballs with their so-small arms. Do you remember the blizzard of ’96? I was in fifth grade and school was cancelled for maybe two weeks, the snow was so tall my brother and I could jump from the short roof out our bedroom window onto the six feet of snow piled on the deck and be perfectly safe, because we were so small, and the snow was so big. I have no idea if it’ll snow again in Brooklyn this year. It feels like it’s been forever. So I take what tender memories I can find and I figure out how to talk about them so that they can feel new, and I think of a world much like this one, but different, and I fill it up with people, and their hearts.
I write about what it feels like to fall in love, how it can feel like a kind of destiny: it’s summer camp, your fingers touch, the world is swallowed by a flood, camp’s over, you’re in the woods, there’s just the two of you, and the moon, it’s over, they find you, you find each other, it’s years later, because of course you do, because where else would you be, but together? Or how it’s a bar, you haven’t followed her back yet, then the follow spots are up, and they’re following the two of you around, and then all of a sudden everything else is dark, and there’s no one else in the whole room, which is the world, right now, it’s just you, and me. I write about how it’s an accident, how you went on vacation, how the wolves cornered the orchestra in the castle, the one you booked a room in, in advance, in Italy, in the summer, how the caretaker’s dead husband was a ghost dressed up as a bird, how you cooked them an omelet, how you waited each night to see if you could hear them up the stairs, the way you left, the way you couldn’t ever forget them, not if you tried, not if you were held hostage by a kid whose parents were paying you to teach him to write a five paragraph essay despite himself, and I write about this because what else is there, in the world, at the end of the day, but love? I mean there’s death and there’s money, and both of them are fucked, so I write about love. I write about waking up next to someone who looks at you like a stranger, I write about what it feels like to untie your lives, the parts of you that go missing, the way the world ends every night and starts up all over again the next morning, the way, the story goes, it is for babies: that each night, as they sleep, the whole world ends, and each morning, as they wake, it’s a new world starting.
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Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World, the debut novel by Sasha Fletcher, is available now from Melville House.