I write about the most imperfect person I can think of. You. Ahem, well, not you in the sense that they share your name, but that they share your imperfections. That also sounded wrong, but I can explain! I like to write about the person you sometimes hate to see in the mirror when you get out of bed. I want to show you all of their trips, falls, and crashes. It's horrible huh? I sincerely apologize for my brutal honesty, but I can't afford to be anything else when I'm writing. I can't get enough, because there's no greater pleasure I can achieve than when readers end up rooting for the same person they hate to look at in the morning.

April 4th

I don’t know what signals the end of the world: the fact that my blender will never work again or the fact that I’ve decided to start writing in a journal. My Mom says it will help relieve myself of all the stress, but so do computer games, and I don’t hear anyone telling me to do that... Maybe that’s because my computer stopped working two days ago.

If I really need to spell it out for whoever decided to pick up some dumb high schooler’s journal, I will. On April 1st I was kicking back on my gamer chair in north Chicago when my lightbulb burst to pieces. Boom. I put down my golf magazine and flushed the toilet before staring out the window and realizing that all of Chicago had turned off at the same time.

It was a nice change of pace for a while, but nothing turned back on. It was like all the electricity everywhere had just... stopped working. Cars stood like statues in the streets. I moved to the pantry and fished out one of our flashlights, flipping the switch on and off. Nothing.

My Mum and I managed to leave our apartment before everything fell into chaos. You’d think that the loss of electricity would bring the world closer together, but man, at this point I’d say it was the only thing keeping us from falling apart. Literally two days later a local gang got their hands on some real shady stuff in the resulting power vacuum.

May 15th

Yeah I’m back. Kind of. I mean, it’s pretty impressive that I even came back to this journal at all. Everything has kind of gone to pot. Me and my Mum managed to leave the Hellscape of Chicago, but it turns out that people are kind of savage without electricity. Who knew? Heh.

Mum says it’ll get better. God is in the details of our lives yeah? I’m just grateful we found access to a spring before anybody else took it over. Fights over clean water have gotten pretty bad. Who knew it would happen so soon? I’m just here asking a whole bunch of questions that I don’t know the answers to, but I’ll come across the answer soon.

May 18th

It's raining and everything is the worst.

May 21st

She made the beans again today. Again. Part of me wants to tell her that I’ve always hated them, but when I see the look on her face it just puts me in my place, ya know?

June 3rd

We've taken refuge inside a treehouse. I always said I wanted one as a little kid, but my Mum said it was too dangerous. Who's laughing now?! Well. No one is really. It's hard, watching people I once knew walk down these rough roads with dirt-lined faces. It's like everyone aged twenty years in two months.

But every once in a while, I'll see them crack a smile and let out a laugh. It makes you look up at the blue sky and feel the breeze on your face. You begin to remember how amazing life really is.

July 24th

I can list about a thousand things that I lost when the world ended. My A/C, gaming console, sweet computer setup, and one really ninja blender. But along with a newfound poetic mind (it makes me cringe at times), I've gained about a billion treasures that matter more to me now. I can see them every time I lay down at night - useless blender next to me - and stare through that darn hole in our treehouse roof. Stars. I never truly knew what they looked like. I aso finally realized one of the brightest of their kind always gives me her extra blanket.

The world is dangerous still, but maybe it's a world I can live in with a vision unclouded.