it begins at the end

Katherine's Blog

Previously… The United Nations and World Leaders told us the truth - climate collapse is unstoppable. There’s nothing left to try. The world is ending. I called my sister, Tricia. Told her to come to me. And bring a gun.

October 1 2029 - blog post

I’m sitting with my fingers on the keys. There’s a surge of energy coming from deep within me, from a place that keeps all the words as they organize themselves into order and then into poetry, and then slip from that place down my veins and out my fingertips, onto the keys and onto the page, and into you.

But today, they are not organizing themselves.

Today is the last day anything will ever feel neat, or light, or soft again.

After today, everything, every word, every feeling and idea will always be said and felt and thought after we learned the Earth is doomed to collapse.

When I was diagnosed with cancer in 2025, I thought that was the big ‘before-and-after’ of my life. Before cancer, I was a stressed, depressed workaholic with a martyr complex and a special interest in self-destruction. After cancer, well, I didn’t have time for any of that. Literally, because treatments and appointments and specialists and long road trips to alternative healing centres took up most of my time. But also, I didn’t have time for all that because I don’t have time for all that.

When you’re trying not to die, you really start to try to live.

And I have regrets for not spending my entire life like this. I had four years between my diagnosis and Today, the last day of Hope. Four years of learning who I am, what I want, and what I need to say.

It wasn’t enough, but I’m glad and grateful I’ve had it.

I think it will come in handy.

What can I say to you, whoever is reading this blog post? One of my few thousand subscribers who come to me for my takes on feminism, philosophy, and cancer patient advocacy? Or one of the twenty or so who hate-follow me in order to pick apart my story or rear back against my carefully-worded but unapologetic analysis of this broken world in which we live?

What can I say that will inspire action? For I truly do not believe All is Lost. What can I say that will, nonetheless, drive home the dire and explosive situations we’ve arrived in?

How can I say, this is so fucking bad, but please don’t give up?

I guess like that.

This is so fucking bad. But please, please do not give up.

I have an idea. I’m not sure of anything right now, and I know you aren’t either. What are you doing reading my blog post when the world has ended? Do you have no one to hug? Don’t you believe it? Are you looking for guidance, for hand-holding, for a plan?

I don’t have a plan. But I have an idea.

Maybe you, like me, have thought about what it means that law and order will begin to collapse under the weight of collapse. What it means that men with guns and trucks will rush into the vacuum of power, their wives and daughters caught in the landslide as they run roughshod over ‘polite society’, where rape and abductions and murders certainly happened, but where generally viewed as ‘bad’, if a little inevitable.

What will it mean for those of us on margins, who were written sideways onto the page after the page was filled with Truth for and by Men?

Social convention, meagre legal repercussion, and collective backlash kept the monsters at bay.

As the former two crumble, we will rely on the latter.

We need each other more than ever. The words are crashing out of my fingers now. I am scared. I am so scared. Will we ever walk alone at night with headphones on again, knowing that there are so many out there who have nothing left to lose?

Are you safe?

I’m not.

What if we were unsafe together?

With enough of us, could that begin to look like safety?

What if we were together, at the end?

Will you come?