Full Stop.

*This post is partially inspired from a post about the Japan earthquake written by fellow blogger, Quaint Murmur

What happens at the end? When not just your home, but your city, your country, your entire existence has been ripped apart by an apocalyptic natural disaster? When you sit amid the ruins, staring at the devastation around you, and not knowing whether you will die of hunger, cold, despair, or sheer loneliness. How can THIS of all things be God’s will? How could He have plotted such catastrophe for the world He so lovingly must have created?

Nothing makes sense to you. Perhaps it never did, this whole ‘life’ thing. Perhaps you never had any purpose after all, despite running after it ever since you can remember. As a child, you ran after fun and games and toys and attention. At school, you wanted good marks, good friends, appreciation. At college, you wanted knowledge, a good education. Following that, a good job, love, marriage, children, grandchildren, an enjoyable retirement, a full circle of life. Instead, you are left with nothing. Not even a single piece of identification like your birth certificate or passport. The circle wasn’t even half complete before it disoriented and scattered into pieces of nothingness, lost in the piles and piles of rubble that surround you now.

Somewhere out there are your loved ones. Alive or dead? You don’t know. In all probability, they too are without any identification linking them to you or proving that they had lived so many years in this place that has come to crumble irreparably. You stare at the sea in the distance, wondering whether another giant wave will come and sweep you away too, like the millions who have already been taken. You wonder whether anything you ever owned is still intact, lying around somewhere, unscathed. Your beloved books, collected and maintained so carefully over the years. Your clothes laden with the fruity-floral scent of your perfume. That favorite pair of dress shoes. Your degree certificate. That birthday card saved up from when you were sixteen. Your secret stash of ‘emergency’ cash at the back of the closet. When emergency actually struck, you had no time or opportunity to grab it before running out the house. You do have your wallet in your packet, wet from the snowfall that is making you shiver, and it is full of credit cards. But what use are the cards when the bank is no more? What use are YOU when your life is no more?

Inadvertently, your mind drifts to that boy you love. Your heart squeezes in angst as you wonder whether he is safe. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry that you are going to die without having told him how you feel. But what difference would it have made anyway? In the end, it seems like nothing makes a difference at all. You think of the friends you had been with just a few hours earlier, laughing and talking with not the vaguest inkling that it was for the last time. The warm pizza you had for dinner has long turned cold in your stomach and it seems like an eternity has passed since you last tasted water. As you look around yourself in the hope of spotting something to eat or drink, your eyes fall on what is obviously the remnant of a laptop. It brings fresh tears to your eyes, that lone, cracked LCD screen peeking out so crudely from the remains of what had once been your home. Your laptop had held your entire life within it: your work, your entertainment, your means of communication, and most importantly your memories – all those gigabytes worth of high resolution photographs that you had so treasured over the years. They are gone forever, as are all the backup CDs. Of course, there is a partial collection on a website online, but what good are websites when in all probability the internet too has collapsed? What good is anything at all when The End is here?

It’s nothing like what you had imagined, right? There is no funeral with flowers and kind eulogies and teary goodbyes. There is just you, waiting for death to come and claim you into its mysterious depths.

That’s the beauty (or ugliness?) of the movie of life. Nothing ever quite turns out the way you expect or want it to, especially not the end. It comes abruptly and when it pleases, and sometimes, like in your case, there is not even a credits sequence that roles.

Sigh.