Golda and I have managed to convince each other that the end of the world is upon us.
A few nights ago, she confronted me with news that a US satellite containing toxic compound is on collision course with the Earth and could hit us in early March.
Then I contributed to the doomsday scenario by reminding her that Suharto had just died due to a lingering illness. Suharto who led a bloody anti-Communist purge in his native Indonesia that resulted in the death of 500,000 to 1,000,000 people. Could it be? Could he really be the antichrist?
We then thought about the other cataclysms that have taken place in recent history, whether environmental, political, social, or otherwise. The forest fires of San Francisco — great balls of fire devouring many?
And the two twenty-something lawyers raised on a steady diet of Hollywood end-of-the-world B-movies and late-night Nostradamus documentaries, fell into glum silence.
“Shit.”
“Shit ka din.”
I told Golda that she should resign posthaste from lawyering and being the poster-girl for anti JPEPA and fulfill her dream to be a waitress in Boracay. She told me that I need to finally learn how to say “I love you”, and move to a rural community infested with landlord violence.
Of course, the next day when we woke up, no one was mixing cocktails by the beach or dropping definitive “I love you”s, and we were still fighting over leftover pandesal at a small kitchen in an office along Kalayaan Avenue.
But really, what would you do if the end of the world was in sight? Not ten, not twenty years from now, not fifty years from now, but in March 2008? A few weeks from now?
It’s a more common question to ask, what would you do if you knew you were about to die? I’ve asked myself that many times and you could say, because I’m morbid, I’ve sorta kinda prepared for that. I have my funeral planned, wrote my last will and testament sometime back (my “estate” is a cardboard box in the far corner of my room, with a grad ring, an assortment of trinkets, a wind-up toy, letters, milestone memorabilia, and pieces of poetry scribbled on kleenex and restaurant receipts), and over the past couple of years, I’ve been slowly giving my books to important people in my life.
But all that (hopefully unnecessary) planning assumes that I die ahead of everyone else. What if we all die together, in one fell swoop, in one satellite collision? You, me, Angelina Jolie and Boutros Boutros Ghali. Two weeks from now.
What then?
