Never Give Up

A story I wrote just for fun

Adam was lying on the sidewalk, head foggy from the collision. He was unsure how long he has been out, but chaos still reigned around him. Fear has changed what used to be a semi functional society into a cauldron of anarchy.

It all started this morning. 

It was business as usual. Traffic jams, jogging, all the usual Thursday morning routines, until the first quake hit. 

This was unusual for Cape Town, the first earthquake to hit these parts in recorded history. What started as an initial shock quickly turned to excitement. People flocked to Facebook and Twitter to tell everyone that they experienced it. As if just being there somehow made them important. Some people even claimed that the apocalypse is coming, and as usual people assuming they are idiots and they will laugh at them later when everything goes back to normal. 

As surely it will, as it always does. 

Now, Adam was not so sure they were wrong.

He had just asked his girlfriend to marry him not two weeks back. He did not really believe in making a big deal out of it, but unfortunately that was what she expected, so he bit the bullet and hired a boat with wine and sunsets, everything that is expected of him, socially obligated to waste his money, how nice. It all went well, she screamed, his heart leapt into his mouth, filling his mouth with the taste of surrender. During the whole ordeal he thought that his love would now burst forth at any point and erase his trepidation, but no, he still felt like a fish willingly jumping from the ocean into a fish tank. 

Is this what he really wants? Will it work out? Does he want to conform and live a normal life as everyone is expected to do? All these questions has been stewing inside him for a long time, but he couldn't face the fact of leaving her and doing something drastic, and what would he even do if he did?

All these question should have been the furthest thing from his mind now as his life was certainly in danger, so he got up and started running.

He heard the sound just in time, barely dodging a guy running at full speed. Where is he even running to? No one knew what is going on or what is causing it, yet everyone is running. 

Some people have formed circles of tranquillity among the chaos and started uttering prayers, all to whichever God they believed in. Adam was not particularly religious, so he was just heading to his girlfriend’s workplace so he can at least be there with her, but the going was tough and the already tense populace in normal times now discarded any and all forms of social decorum and fighting and looting was the name of the game.

Adam made it to a side road on his way out of the city centre, cracks could be seen all over the road and one block of flats had flames licking out of almost all the windows, black smoke bellowing up into the stratosphere, probably doubling the size of the hole in the O-zone layer.

There had to be a rational explanation for all this. Fire falling from the sky, earthquakes, one person even spontaneously caught fire and burned out in seconds, leaving an acrid, though somewhat appetizing bacony, taste in his mouth. 

As far as rational explanations go, even Richard Dawkins would fail to explain this s**t storm. All electronics were off; even battery power failed causing everyone's phones to turn off and probably causing more panic that the fire raining down from the sky. One teenage girl was still trying to take a selfie with a fireball in the background when the phone exploded and her head transformed into a myriad of flying meatballs. That was when the electronics gave out. Maybe there was a God and he found selfies as fucked up as he did? Naturally all the cars also stopped working, forcing him to get some exercise. Two roads back a guy was riding a donkey cart, looking particularly smug.

He started running full out, getting to his girlfriend being the only thing that mattered to him, all his doubts removed by a visceral and overwhelming feeling of love and affection. Belatedly realizing that his doubts where just a symptom of a broken society, all the expectation, stress, competitiveness, culminating in a permanent feeling of discomfort and self-doubt. 

Everyone always trying to be better, look better, have more money, all just factors keeping people isolated and scared of letting someone in. 

All for nothing when the brittle fabric of society is tearing at the seams.

He was two blocks away from the place where his girlfriend works, he just had to get through De Waal park, a serene, usually littered with homeless people, park where people walk their dogs and play with their kids (hopefully their own). 

The looming site of Table Mountain, now with a myriad of little fires busy coalescing into one big inferno, was ominously burning in the background.

He put his last remaining energy into his tired legs. As he exited the park, he rounded a corner into another side street. About 50 meters away was the Salon where Sarah practiced hairdressing, helping people to look better, helping them be prettier than other people so they can feel better about themselves. How conceited mankind was. 

People have been littered with so many expectations of how they must look and be, that all they care about is being better than others, instead of dealing with what they really want to be like and how they want to live their life. 

Realizing that this was no time for philosophizing, again, he concentrated on his burning lungs and the fact that his legs must keep moving.

He finally made it to the salon, the windows were smashed and the door broken open. A feeling of dread crashed into him. He ran into the building. The mirrors inside all smashed, if this was the end of the world, God probably smashed them to punish humanity for its conceit. 

He ran up the stairs. Nothing. She must have left and gone somewhere safer, or at least he hoped so. He stumbled back outside. 

The sky was painted in an ominously orange  glow. Feeling excessively tired and drained, he sat down on the sidewalk, trying to organize his thoughts on what to do next. He only wanting to find Sarah, hold her in his arms and make her feel safe. That is what loved ones are for at the end of the day, to make each other feel safe. 

A deafening roar sounded. Coming from nowhere in particular, but resonating with power. 

He looked up into the sky. A bunch of clouds where separating from the others and descending towards the earth in an almost controlled fashion. If this was to be the end, he supposed that he will have to pray. If they guy next to Jesus on the cross, whose name he promptly forgot, not a good beginning to his path to God, could be saved at the last minute, so can he, he hoped. 

A second roar sounded, with what sounded like laughter in the background. 

Can it really be? God is here. He could see a figure on the clouds now, a humanly figure. This was it, God has come. This is really the end. All he could do now was pray.

He started praying, lost for words on how to even begin, with apologizing he supposed. 

It was hard concentrating with this music. 

Wait, music? He opened his eyes. The guy on the cloud was singing? The music was getting louder. The tune sounded somewhat familiar, although difficult to place in the current situation.

Wait...no way. 

The music was deafening now, and he suddenly recognized the song. NO. F*****G. WAY.

Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you

He listened to the whole song, then suddenly. 

BOOM. 

silence. 

The cloud dissipated.  The most profound stunned silence followed. 

Disbelief.

A barely audible fit of ecstatic laughter could be heard from the dissipating cloud. He barely made out the final words. 

"Worth it".

Reviews

[SleeplessVolcano]

Great read! Trip down memory lane when I lived in Cape Town and fed squirrels in the gardens.....lets hope it happens in a different city!! Him not finding the girlfriend for me was a piece hanging suspended in the end.....yes, the ending was surely deliberately shocking.......but it still left me with the thought..."Is she OK?".

[Johan Coetzee]

Thanks a lot. Obviously this story is not a serious one, but the more philosophical parts are serious. Him not finding her I thought would tie into the previously alluded to fact that when it is the real end it will not come after all the conclusions you want, but rather in the middle of everything.