Local Girl Liveblogs the Apocalypse

a mutually agreed upon hallucination

Previously… Major drives Katherine home after Celeste’s tea carves the edge off her pain. Her sister Tricia accompanies Major on a fuel run, while the world hovers between disbelief and resistance to the news of the end of the world as it was known. As she lays down to rest, Katherine ponders The Knower, the part of herself that witnesses rather than acts.

Katherine’s Blog

I know I blog a lot about death and dying. Maybe you're tired of reading that. Believe me, I'm tired of thinking about it. I wish I could steer my thoughts away but sometimes, most of the time really, I feel like I'm not even a little bit in control of them. They control me.

Lately, though, since the news about the climate collapse, as a thousand tiny failures every day change the way we live, I've been trying to think about what I want to happen, at least as often as I think about what I'm deathly afraid of.

So I want to share a little bit of my vision with you, out there. Maybe you're drawn to it and want to come help us make it happen. Or maybe you'll be inspired to create something yourself, where you are.

What if... Wow, this is harder than I thought. To put this dream into words. Even as a writer, I feel the words I need to describe this to you have scampered off to the edges of the world, and I have to go on life-affirming journeys just to bring them back, on by one, to type them onto my screen in the right order – in the perfect order – for you to understand. Not just understand, but feel. Believe. How do I make you believe in me? Is that even something I can make happen?

Or... do I really just have to trust that I'll be understood. How terrifying. I suppose I have to just purge it, click Post, and hide under the blankets.

What if we had a big plot of land, hundreds of acres of forest, with a lake in it or a river winding through it. Hills and valleys, game trails, Canadian shield surging out from the ground and creating gaps in the tree canopy.

What if we build a few little shelters on the land, tiny homes just for us, just for women. Just big enough to live in, nothing fancy. It's not about the tiny homes, really, it's about the bigger picture. Say we had a big communal building with a big area for cooking and serving. A shared space for us all to use, so we can decide when we want to be alone and when we want to be together.

We could stop there, if that's enough. Just some land, tucked away, so we can take care of ourselves and each other and learn how to live in a way that doesn't ask too much from the earth anymore. To ride out the end of days together, with the mosquitoes and the berry bushes.

But what if we could become a good, a net positive? Maybe we could even help Earth heal, somehow. Though it might look more like hospice. But if that's all we can do – ease the transition for the earth, ourselves, and each other, than I'd prefer that to staying somewhere so public, in a community but without community, you know? With the slow trickle of inevitable loss until there's nothing left.

What if someone with more firepower than me decides they want our house, or food, or us?

Sorry. We all know the reasons why women are less safe if law and order collapse, though those systems never worked as promised for us anyway. But there was at least a veneer of repercussions, and without that, well. You know and I know.

Back to the land. We could raise animals, chickens and sheep or goats. We wouldn't have to eat them, or we could. I don't know. We could keep bees, keep our little garden pollinated for as long as possible. If the bees can't survive, we hand pollinate. We could celebrate solstice, we could dance around a fire. I can see it all so clearly in my mind, but it feels so remote when I try to describe it. A bit like what I imagine believing in heaven feels like.

A commune. An intentional community. A women's land like the ones started up all over the continent in the 70s.

Personally, I am done with this time of Man. This anthropocene. Men in charge of everything is the reason we are in this mess, undeniably. And they couldn't move aside fast enough for women to come in with solutions, they just kept blocking us and pretending what we wanted and needed, what the earth needed, didn't matter, wasn't important, told us it was too late anyway and besides, where would the money come from?

I don't think money is a real thing. It's a mutually agreed upon hallucination, and I just don't to live under its rule anymore. I think it would be a woeful missed opportunity to not take this experience and do something beautiful with it.

That's why I struggle so much to describe this idea. This women's land. Because I've never even seen it done myself. I know some exist and I know more are being created, but this is something so new to me that I don't even have the language for it. So I want to describe it to you in smaller terms, as if I'm speaking one-to-one to any woman who might want to live here.

What if you lived among other women, some younger than you and some older, who could help bring your laundry to the shared laundry room, and bring it home for you when it's finished? And you knew she helped just because you needed it and she saw that. And she knows it's meaningful to help because she also needed help when her kid was little and she was struggling to get rest and felt really alone – and other women in the community, her friends, gave her time to herself for respite, or just came over and made breakfast or watched her child while she had a shower?

What if that was normal? If you could count it?

What kind of world is that little kid going to grow up into, otherwise?

Because I'm looking around and seeing what we've done to this world, and I feel such raw, bottomless shame. And children are still being born to this inheritance, that's not something that will stop because at the end of the day – at the end of the world – we just can't stop men from raping women.

So let me tell you the deepest truth I have.

I want a world without rape.

I'm going to try to make one.