The lights went out all too soon, all too fast.

We never saw it coming. It was a monster, so large and full of nothingness that our minds could not even come close to understanding it. It started not too long ago, and we watched as distant stars started to dim, like the way a candle flickers at the end of its life. But this was not just the simple life cycle of a star, this was something consuming it whole.

So we watched, and we assumed, but never really knowing what was going on. Maybe that was the worst part, that we would never really understand the way the cosmos worked, in what wondrous ways it had weaved itself this world so full of beautiful uncertainty.

I stayed indoors most of the time, peering into the void outside, of the fact that any day might be the last haunting me. It was hard, accepting the fact that we were wrong about everything. The world will not end in fiery heat death, a frigid ice age, in war and bloodshed or treacherous plague. It will end with our worst fear- the unknown. The very thing that makes our skin crawl.

And then the nearer stars began to die out, and that was when the panic really started to grow. Full fledged panic, rumors filling news sites and social media. This impending apocalypse had come much too soon. We were supposed to live longer, do better things, but what had we done, really? People searched for their answers in the liquid nothingness of the sky, but it held no such thing.

Time became sacred.

The stars we had so lovingly named, the ones that formed constellations that we had conjured up in our minds, started to dim, and the nights only got darker. There were people that rejoiced, people that worried, people that profited off the panic but in the end the only raw human emotion hidden underneath all those layers of society was terror.

 And from there was where it rose, a powerful human resistance that united every single person. The same humans that had fought each other at every point in history banded together because of that primitive emotion, the fear of the end. We had written stories about this, made movies, and told jokes but now that it was here, humanity had been stripped to its core.

The darkness had reached the sun, and daylight lost the brilliance it used to have. But humanity did not. Shelters were built. Warmth from the earth had been harnessed. Oxygen was collected. We built ourselves a post-apocalyptic shelter, a civilization that still thrived somehow in the absence of the sun.

I sit in the little tent we built for ourselves, amidst hundreds of others exactly the same. The only world we know now is a dome, built of the broken remains of our shattered hope. Outside this little haven, the world is nothing but pure darkness and freezing cold, like stepping off the edge of the world. It is not much, this strange apocalyptic shelter. Life will never be the same again, but maybe just the fact that it exists, and we are still alive, is all that matters. We hadn’t let it consume us, like it had to everything else.

I used to think a lot of things were beautiful. The mountains that rose to heights of wispy clouds. The first snows of winter, the unchangeable warmth a summer day brings. But perhaps the most beautiful thing is humanity, the way we have built ourselves up from mere apes to intelligent beings. The way we find beauty in everything in the world, and find solace in the stories we conjure. There is something so pure in the smile filled with true joy that I’ll never understand.

We refused to die.