Remember all those times when your crush got mighty pissed at you just because you decided to crash her 16th birthday uninvited, or turned up one evening for a nightcap unannounced and how, as the police took you away, she’d shouted that she wouldn’t date you even if you were the last man on earth? Remember? Sorry if it took several psychiatric hours to bury it all and now I’ve dug it back up, but imagine if you and her did end up being the last couple on earth. Wouldn’t the very fate of humanity now rest on your metaphoric shoulders? Would the need to procreate supersede others or would she still be stuck up about that old restraining order?
First of all, when I say apocalypse I am not talking about the ‘Why didn’t you message last night’ type apocalypse, or even the ‘Oh poo, another glacier just melted’ level of disaster. I mean an earth’s final showdown, four horsemen in the sky sorta thing, the one that was the theme of Douglas Adams’s second book in the Hitchhiker’s series. Imagine if something managed to destroy all life except for you and a lady friend.
Well, in case such a joyous occasion arrives — joyous except of course for the near-total annihilation of the earth and all things living — the first thing to do would be to feel special. It would be like being born all over again. The same selection process, and once again you are one in a million, or six billion to be precise.
So the first thing to do is not muck things up with the lady. Try and assess what survival skill set each of you bring to the table. This will be tougher than it seems; your ability to remember all the HD sports channels is about as useful as her adeptness at telling fake designer bags from a distance. I can neither make a decent shelter nor hunt but morbidly enough, I am sure something else will kill me first before I even risk starvation. And there are many more instances in this hypothetical apocalypse that will not really play out in my/our favour.
In other words, both men and women today don’t have any of those day-saving skills. We live digital lives and emote through a keyboard using yellow round-headed GIFs. We need to work on that. Heidegger said, live each day as if it’s your last but we seem to have forgotten that. We need to bring that skill of the kill back.
And not just to impress her, although, considering you were her last choice and now apocalypse is upon you, she might anyway reconsider. But try and be more than that — the last choice — maybe someone she can rely on. We are far from being her knight in shining armour but to even make it to the ranks of her feudal slave could be a positive start. In return, she will have to learn to make a fire by rubbing sticks.
The writer is a lover of wine, song and everything fine.
