Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
I WAS ALWAYS A big fan of reading. Books could cast me into different worlds. They could teach and show me new things. They made it possible for me to experience incredible possibilities through the eyes of different individuals. But most importantly, they helped me escape. Going through the pages of a book, I found myself immersed in new lands making new friends, and enemies, along the way. And though the characters I read about faced challenges, they were always able to overcome them in some way. They would always have a happy ending.
There was one book that stood out to me because it broke the stereotypical outcome every book faces. In this book, the main characters would taste their happy ending they would even start to live it, but then something unfortunate would happen and they'd find themselves back in a state of despair wishing to have a blissful and joyous ending.
When everything started, this was the only book I had access to. For a long while at least. Even though I loved it so much, I had grown tired of it. I could recite its first paragraph by heart. "If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle." I would skip past that line not realizing how much it would relate to my life later on.
I closed my book in defeat with a quiet sigh and stared blankly at the cover. I was bored, wishing that something could take my mind off the feeling. Unfortunately, I didn't have many options, I only had two. I could color, although at that moment I would simply be recoloring pictures that were already completed, or I could read a book that I had already finished several times before.
I, like everyone else, was unprepared for the end of the world. But what separated me from the rest of the people in my group, was the fact that they had stopped at home to grab whatever they could get their hands on. They stuck together through all the chaos, where I was left to fend for myself with nothing but the clothes on my back and whatever I had in my school bag. It wasn't ideal but it was better than nothing.
My attention turned to Carl who was sitting in the dirt a few feet away from me. He was holding a toy monster truck in one hand and a little car in his other, every couple of seconds he would run the monster truck over the car making crashing sounds under his breath. I had never played with toys in that manner so the activity didn't seem like much fun to me, but it was keeping him occupied.
