All things considered, I felt pretty smug to have rationed myself so well that I was smoking my last cigarette while I waited for the end of the world. I was somewhere in Nevada having already been driving east on Interstate 15 when the news came in that it would all be over soon. I could say that I had a premonition, but the truth is I’ve been waiting for the news every day since you left. One hundred eighty three disappointing sunrises are a lot to weigh on the balance of one right guess, but nobody’s going to be around to keep score so I guess I’ll let myself be smug about that too.

When traffic got bad going both ways, I stopped at a roadhouse I didn’t remember from previous drives, surrounded by a town that seemed like it should have given up the ghost around the end of the gold rush. It didn’t have much to recommend it except that it was a place to stop and better than waiting for the end while sitting in traffic. Despite the line of cars stretching from horizon to horizon to escape the coasts before the water rose, only about a hundred people had the same idea, but they did enough drinking and fighting and fucking for twice their number. Even after the lights went out, the party went on. Only around six with the sun threatening one final appearance did the crowd disperse off to who knows where. Maybe a dozen people were passed out inside when I made my way to the porch to find a good view of the last sunrise.

I was still drunk when you appeared in front of me, but not too drunk. If I’d wanted an earlier oblivion, I could have stayed in California and waited for the quakes to start. Even here, the ground had started shaking on and off around midnight. I heard some drunk say the world would probably shake us off like a dog with fleas hours before it tore itself apart and that there wouldn’t be anyone around to actually witness the end, but that seemed like a semantic argument not worth having.

I said your name and you said mine and then you were straddling my lap, your tongue in my mouth, your hands in my hair, the Earth rumbling all around us and the roadhouse slowly shaking itself apart. I didn’t ask how you found me in the middle of nowhere either one of us should ever be or why or even if you meant to because it had all been overtaken by pending events and reduced to an anecdote. All that mattered was the now. I could have asked why you came back, but I know the answer to that one: It doesn’t matter anymore. You came back because there’s no reason not to anymore. We don’t just get a clean slate just because the dirty slate gets smashed.

And when I was with you, feeling the warmth of your skin under my hands and the heat of your body from the inside with the ground trembling and the sun rising, I let myself hope that the world would end before we finished and that in our last moment, we would be joined and merged together. It didn’t happen. You rode me faster with each rise and fall and I spent myself inside of you. It was almost a perfect moment and it shattered my smugness. For the first time since I learned what was coming, I let myself cry. I wept like a child who’s lost and found something important to him and come out changed by the process, held you in my arms, drew in the scent of your hair, and wished for one cigarette more.