Grandpa used to tell me that as kids they would ask each other if they would survive the apocalypse. They meant it as in if you could survive the apocalypse, not if you would. I think the answers may have varied if they did. Nevertheless, Grandpa both could and would survive, at least long enough to raise me.
He also used to tell me a magical man made of music brought me to him. He meant that as in, my parents would try to survive the apocalypse, but couldn’t. I’m left guessing if they said they would as children. I’m also left guessing whether I would have survived the apocalypse.
For, as long as I can remember, it has been over.
Grandpa didn’t like to tell me about the before. He didn’t want me to miss it like he did. He didn’t want to miss it anymore then he did. Once he told me about ice cream. On a scorching day where I was certain I would melt without the water’s edge to lie in. It was a slip of mouth and heat delirium, but that night I held his memory to my tongue. I imagined what cool could feel like when mixed with something other than the rocks of the river.
Despite that, I don’t miss it. Not like Grandpa at least. I wonder.
I wonder what the T.V’s on the rusted and falling shelves could have played in the before. I wonder what the colorful packages tasted like before they went sour when the power went out and the freezers stopped working. I wonder what it must have been like to ride the buses when they weren’t left abandoned and still on the side of cracked asphalt. I wonder what it was like when you could know other people.
When Grandpa died he told me, if I could do it again, I would never have survived. Then I asked him about me, about us scrubbing our clothes in the river against bark and softening our grown vegetables over the fire. He told me, you would have died a baby, and that would have been mercy.
I buried Grandpa in the flower meadow I would play in as he carved, and he still missed even then. As I planted the daisies he always reminisced over his grave, I thought about how he always thought I missed too. I have only ever wondered, and I was left to wonder, what I would do now—as in could and would.