In the end, I just didn’t know what to do with myself.
The world had ended.
I was the only survivor.
And that was that.  

Food would never be a problem, not in my lifetime.  I had all the books in the world, all the dvds, all the toys and cars and power tools a man could want.  I had all the time I could ever need to create anything I could ever imagine.
But what was the point?
So that I could brag of my too-long-ignored genius to the millions of cats and dogs descending into feral chaos?  Perhaps I could show the millions of ghosts that I imagined must be watching me enviously, how lucky I was to be alive.  Maybe I could at long last justify my existence, say in all honesty that I was definitively the best there was at any – and indeed every – task I put my hand to?
No, it was no use.

You know how they say – as a curse, you understand – they say, “May you live in interesting times.”
You know what’s worse? 
“May you survive interesting times.” 
They never said a thing about how dull it would be to be the only one to come out the other side of those “interesting times.”
They also say, “Be careful what you wish for.”
Well, it’s not as if I’d actually wished for humanity to disappear.  Not as such.  And I wasn’t so mad as to believe that I had somehow been the engineer or architect of the world’s situation.  It wasn’t me that killed off the rest of the human race in a single, grotesque weekend.
In fact, “they” never said anything that proved to be remotely useful to a man in my position.
And without anyone to tell me what to do, I found myself at loose ends.  Without any necessary goals or needs, I found that I lacked the drive to do…anything.  I didn’t need to hunt – food was readily available in any house or apartment or lifeless shop I found my way into.  Didn’t need to actively entertain myself – just pick up whatever struck my fancy in the moment.  Didn’t want for shelter, even from the increasingly threatening wildlife.
There likewise wasn’t any point in attempting to create any art, or to put any of my thoughts down in any permanent way.  No one to see it except myself, and everything always looked better in my mind than it did in the real world anyhow.

I did spend a few weeks pondering the meaning of existence.  I was, after all, the sole authority on the subject.  But I found, as I had always suspected, that there was none.  Meaning, I mean. All the world’s religions were wrong, after all was said and done.  Because, apart from myself, literally everything had been said and done – by anyone who wasn’t me.  And it had all proved pointless.  All that thinking and pontificating and judgement.  Millennia of human endeavour, right out the window.  Religion had wasted the time and energy of billions and billions of lives, and provided nothing of any lasting utility.  There was nothing there to help me.  As I had always suspected.
But this was something of a hollow victory.  I still had no one to brag to.

So what did I do with myself?
I don’t rightly recall.
I masturbated a lot.  With no one to judge, I could whip it out any time and any place I felt the urge.  And I seemingly felt the urge a lot.  At least in the early days.
I talked to whatever cats were about.  And it was always cats.  Dogs descended into barbarism much faster than did cats.  It’s like they said, “Any society is three meals away from anarchy.”  Well, dogs were always much more civilized than cats, and so fell further and fell faster and harder.  Cats maintained what little civility they had cloaked themselves in for much longer.  But they too eventually gave up any pretense of being human and simply faded away from my life.
I drove around a lot, while the gas supplies remained uncontaminated.  And the lack of human crowds really did make the natural wonders of the world even more spectacular than they had ever been before.  But just seeing things.  Well.  You’ve seen one thing, you’ve seen them all, right?
I talked to myself a lot, I will admit.  Especially as time wore on.  Just kind of said whatever popped into my head.  This was after the cats stopped listening, you understand.  And I feared for a time that talking to myself quite that much might be a sign of incipient madness.  But then I reassured myself that one simply could not suffer solipsism if one was in literal fact literally the only human being alive.  And that certainly made me feel better.  I was very glad to have had that little chat with myself, I can tell you.
I did experiment with drugs.  A little.  But again, I can tell you with absolute authority: drugs don’t solve anything.  Altering the mind did nothing to alter the world, after all.  And apart from anything else, supplies tended to be much more difficult to come by than supplies of basic necessities.  Ha.  Addiction wasn’t going to be a problem for this man!
No, I couldn’t really tell you what I did with myself all those years alone.  Even if I wanted to.  Which I don’t.

And so I find myself here.  Seemingly at the end of all things.  Well, the end of all things human, at any rate.
It’s all rather sad.
Humanity, I mean.
Millennia of effort, and nothing to show for it.  Here was me, the absolute literal peak of mental and biological evolution, and it all ended up meaning nothing.  As far as I could tell, and there certainly wasn’t anyone to tell me different.  I was the ultimate expression of the species, and it simply didn’t matter.  We’d have done just as well remaining in the trees.  Better, probably, as we wouldn’t have been able to engineer the demise of our own species.
Heh.  Another pithy and incontrovertible truth.
Another hollow victory. Ah well.
I suppose it’s time to go.  Nothing really to stop me.  Nothing to hold me here.  No point.
Good-bye, then.






















What?
You’re still here?










Oh hell.