at the world’s end, a bird sings of tomorrow.

At the world’s end, a bird sings of tomorrow.

It’s a line from a mobile game I’ve spent too much money on over the years. The character says it as she launches a world erasing attack on whichever poor pack of skeletons I happen to be facing at the time. I imagine the bird that sings of tomorrow at the world’s end. It’s a small, common grey and brown bird. The kind you see in any american town or city. I assume the character expresses it as a message of futility. After all, she does seem to end the world with her noble phantasm (the aforementioned world ending attack) and is maybe remarking on how enemies may often believe there will be something left for them if they can manage to survive the oncoming and inevitable decimation.

I thought of the same sentiment during last night’s viewing of Godzilla Minus One. Food and film are the only things I’m snobbish about so when I say that was one of, if not the best movie going experience I’ve ever had, I mean it as rare and high praise. In my snobbish way, I criticized the american Godzilla movies, “well the whole thing with Godzilla is, she’s a metaphor for the nuclear bombs that Japan was so horribly destroyed by! The American godzilla movies never communicate or express this!!!”

Not at all the case with Minus One. You see, I didn’t know the tickets I bought were for a 4DX showing of the movie, so when the monster first appeared, and my seat started violently vibrating and erratically jostling me around… well, you can imagine my shock mirroring that of the on screen characters.

When its name was mentioned after long stretches of peaceful or melodramatic character acting, dread would creep into my gut, anxiously anticipating the next round of violent overstimulation I was about to be subject to. Thunderous audio, flashing lights, mist and water being sprayed into the theater. It was quite a lot! but all in good fun. Nothing close to the dark reality of constantly looking over head, wondering if a third and fourth nuke was coming. Truly I hated America in those moments, how could you unleash such destruction upon an entire people. Yet still, even in the wake of Godzilla’s destruction, many birds sang of tomorrow.

So we left the theater, laughing the whole way, exchanging stories and glances until we got home learnt even more about what each other’s bodies were for. Earlier I had exclaimed “I am fighting for my life right now to stay single!!”

“Well I think you’re losing!” she laughed

Even during the act I was thinking and remembering, and fighting off ghosts. This was the first time she was able to finish just from sex she said, I told her I was glad I could do that for her. I should have been as smug and satisfied as I ever could be, but rather, as she held me I thought about how I never quite recover even from much less intimate entanglements such as these. Even people who I didn’t quite get along so well with, who didn’t fit so perfectly under my body, I always so painfully miss them when they’re gone. I never truly do survive these separations, they’re more violent and devastating every subsequent time, they utterly destroy me, they end my world. I rise anew more scarred and mutated than before, like that damn monster. Yet still, in my head, a tiny voice says “what if it’ll be different this time? what if it’ll never end and be sweet and beautiful?”

I’ll respond, “one of us will die first, someone will still be destroyed more horribly than can be expressed or imagined!”

Then it’ll say, “but not for a long time! and maybe you’ll go together!”

It’s that damn bird, won’t ever stop singing, I just have to learn to tune it out.