Gorgeous weather today. Seems funny that last night it should have been raining, two days before, snow. It’s warm, there’s a hint of freshness on the air and only a suggestion of a chill in the breeze. I put on flip flops and a skirt and wandered into the grassy area outside of the complex, kicking off the sandals, feeling the grass under my toes, (even if it was a bit stiff in places, wet in others). On the air was the distant smell of freshly mowed grass, exhaust. It smelled like summer, reminded me of home.

Normally thoughts of home would bring a weight to my steps, but in the sun, the bubbly clouds riding the blue sky and haze about my head, it didn’t bother me, the buck stopped at nostalgia.

Traffic was piled up on the main road running next to the complex and alongside my apartment. Parents stealing their children from the system, back to home for the summer, moving and change and endings and beginnings.

I made my way to the sidewalk and wandered in the direction of the campus. Behind me, a familiar voice shouted, “Wait up!”

Turning, I saw Kyle flocking his own way to me across the sidewalk. “Hey new girl.”

“What’s doing, Kyle?”

“Finished my finals yesterday, bored today. Funny how that works. The paradox of summer. What’re you doing?”

I shrugged. “Wandering toward campus, mostly just thought I’d get out in the sun, enjoy the day some.”

“And it is a fine day. Don’t get enough of these in the Spring.”

“I can kind of see that.”

“You’ve been here for a week and you can already see that. We live in a weird place.”

“Two weeks.”

“My bad.” We began making our way toward the campus, dragging along, shooting the shit.

“Looks like the end of the world up here,” Kyle said as we turned onto campus, the sides of the street lined with cars being packed tight, people standing around, waiting for more to pack, in a hurry, the road packed tight with cars fighting to get into traffic or turn against the traffic.

“What a madhouse.”

“I wonder if it would go like this,” he said.

“What?”

“The end of the world? An asteroid hurtling at breakneck speeds… Yellowstone starts to wobble… North Korea gets trigger happy. How would it finally go down? Would people come pick up their kids from school? Would they bother moving out, would it remain a stasis?”

“You think like this often? The end of the world?”

“I’m an intellectual.”

“You’re a philosopher.”

“Then I picked the right major.”

“You’re a phil major?”

“Indeed.”

“Aren’t Philosophy majors antsy guys who can’t keep still in class who grow into bearded men on mountaintops?”

“Something like that I suppose.”

“Nothing against you!” I quickly recovered, feeling like an ass, redness rising in my cheeks.

“Someone has to go against the grade, be unique. A snowflake on a rainy day.”

“Poetic.”

“Hardly.”

The conversation lulled as we wandered down the street, weaving around people holding laundry baskets and wobbling shelving units.

“They’d riot.”

He looked at me out the corner of his eye, a considering gaze, then looked down ahead again. “Maybe.”

“People are prone to panics. Mob mentalities.”

“Give a person a two days to live and what do they do? Everyone says they’d go skydiving or they’d travel or go do something reckless. But I think with two days, three days, not enough time to gather their wits about them, they’d look around at what they have and they’d curl up with the ones they love.”

I considered his words but didn’t trust them. Something too sickly sweet. Unrealistic. Not with divorce rates so high. “Maybe some.”

“Half, perhaps. A crowd always seems so large – but no one thinks of themselves, the ones at home on the couch watching the mob scene on the nine o’clock news.”

“People say that they’d do something irrational because before they were too afraid, because they didn’t have time, but with imminent demise, nothing matters anymore. You do what you want. Ethics go out the window. What does it matter to wrong someone else if it’s over for everyone in a matter of hours? You take risks, your life isn’t issue. You go nuts.”

“You believe everyone has some kind of fuse inside that imminent mortality ignites?”

“Sure.”

“People are waiting for a spark?”

“Yes.”

“We’re touching on pretty general philosophical issues here, the stuff of self-help books and motivational speakers. Seize the day.”

I shrugged.

“What about the recluse,” he asked, looking at me from the edge of his eye again, holding his gaze. “What about the one who has no one next to them when the end comes, who’s free of the mob mentality?”

“Everyone has someone,” I mumbled.

“Maybe.”

I shrugged. “It’s just like every day before it I guess.”

“And they’re still on their couch, alone and lonely, nothing’s different?”

I felt him steering the conversation under me, along a path of some blend between the unspoken and the abstract. But I went with it. I wanted to. “I guess the same things that put them on the couch in the first place haven’t changed.”

“Sad that it’s no difference, to be so near to death.”

“If you word it like that.”

“Unique perspective, to be so separated from both the mob and those who hold tight to family, unafraid of death, separate from life.”

Maybe it was what he said about family, maybe it was the nature of the conversation, but I got quiet. Kyle continued on.

“Bit like just watching the fireworks. Separating yourself from life might put one in a more calm respect, but I think there becomes a focus, a bogging of interest. Is loneliness a kind of death?”

He let the question hang in the air, opened his mouth to ask another, held for a moment, then let his mouth fall closed. I could almost hear the question he’d meant to ask, despite his words not forming, his mind changing, likely deciding we were too fresh of friends, that he didn’t know me well enough to be so bold. I was glad he didn’t ask. I think deep inside, some part of me wanted him to ask, to go right out and say it, but not yet.

He laughed, tried to break the stillness, the Stranger walking between us, making some kind of crack about stirring such a deep conversation from a walk to campus, where the cars were end to end along the street side. Above, gloomy dark clouds swirled up from the southeast. Kyle narrowed his eyes at them.

“Might be better to turn home.”

The clouds moved in ahead of us, layers of dark blue across the flat gray, surrounding what once was  a sunny fresh day. We put the storm at our backs and made our way back to the complex. We didn’t say much but thankfully it seemed that the Stranger had moved on, maybe staying to watch the storm, maybe hustling ahead to greet me at my apartment, to welcome me back to loneliness, to remind me of my loss, to spread lies that there was no apocalypse coming, that days in solitude were natural, therapeutic. That they were helping me.

When I stopped at Kyle’s house on the way home, I almost asked if he wanted to go to a movie, to take in a cheap dinner somewhere, to hang out and have a drink or two. But I didn’t. Like the question that still dangled in the air, it was too soon for that. I wasn’t ready. So I said, “hope to see you around,” and I meant it.