The Last Blunted Pencil at the End of the World

The idea came to us all at once.

I remember where I was at the exact moment it happened.

I was with my wife and my son at the beach down by the pier. I looked at her in astonishment, and she looked at me, equally amazed. Our son looked at both of us, not sure what to make of the thought that must then have crossed his mind, for he was only just able to sit up on his own. But he flung his little, plastic spade down onto the sand and began to gurgle and coo at us and that’s how my wife and I knew he had experienced the same bolt of insight.

All around us on the beach people began gathering up the things they had with them and making their way towards the middle of the beach in a casual but orderly fashion. All the beachgoers then tossed all their possessions unceremoniously into a big heap before making their way back to their cars, hotels, and houses with only the clothes on their backs (and their keys).

The house-moving companies decided to work for free helping folks take everything to the huge, self-organised heaps that sprung up all over the world in stadiums, school playgrounds, cricket pitches, airports, junkyards and just about anywhere else with enough space to handle a mound of things a mile high.

People with trucks, vans, and cars with big trunks also began chipping in so it was fortunate that all the oil companies decided to give away free petrol and diesel until they exhausted their reserves, dismantled all their rigs, refineries, and petrol stations, and added it all as scrap to their nearest pile.

All in all, it was a relaxed and joyful affair that lasted for only a few months before we had fully and finally decommissioned every part of our civilisation. It took a lot of collaboration and patience, but we got there in the end.

Everyone agreed that it was a huge relief to finally be able to sit together around the bonfire wearing only rags and feathers, laughing, telling stories, and marvelling at the stars in the beautiful, dark sky until the peachy-pink dawn light broke through the night.

The real turning point for us came when we spoke excitedly with our far-away relatives over the phone for the last time.

“Thank you, and good luck,” we said.

And we all turned off our phones, surrendered them to the heap, and became what we once were, so wild and so wise.

I’m the last one standing by this heap, watching the big, rotating prisms in the sky beam up all our stuff. I’m writing this on the last shred of paper in the world, with the last blunted pencil, so that they can keep it as a record of what happened here.

In a moment, I’ll release this note and the pencil into a ray of starlight, and they will be gone forever. I’ll go back to my wife and son, and we will live our life together for a time and one day we will all die. But there will be others who live on after us.

If you’re reading this, you’re one of them and you’re probably sixty million light years away, wondering why we got to this point.

Don’t think too badly of us. We got there in the end.

Love, Sam