Alone on Valentine’s Day. No different than any other day, you suppose, yet the date makes it feel more empty. You look at the calendar hanging on your wall. You put an X in the box and think back to a time when you didn’t even own a calendar. It has been four years since the year at the top has changed and you stopped keeping track of how the days were supposed to move long ago. February 14th will always be on Sunday. Not a bad day for Valentine’s Day, all things considered. When the world functioned as it used to, Sunday would have been a weekend. A day of rest; a day to spend with those you love. You remember the endless possibilities. Going to a bar, meeting someone, and taking that person on a date. Eating at a restaurant, listening to live music, the ambiance of other couples’ chatter filling the room. Perhaps then you didn’t realize how desolate it would be without all of those other couples. You would complain about the noise, be annoyed at having to shout over your meal just to hear your partner. Before, you never would have missed it. You walk out your front door, figure you would make your way to a grocery store or gas station. You recall that the grocery store five miles down the road still had some canned food on it’s shelves. Was it beans, or corn? You wonder to yourself. Valentine’s Day. You scoff at the thought. The first year in the world alone you truly made an effort. You had convinced yourself that they were coming back. They had to come back. Why were you alive if they were not coming back? You celebrated every holiday. Trekking into the woods with an axe and trying to find a tree you could carry all by yourself, and hanging lights that would never turn on. You built a fire and cooked a chicken you had caught. It was disgusting, you swore you would do better next time. On the Valentine’s Day of your first year alone you made pasta. You boiled water over an open flame and you dumped a packet of wheat noodles into the pot. You assumed that pasta would be much easier than chicken, and your sauce was from the grocery store; it would make you smile for the first time in months. But as you sat by yourself, eating soggy pasta with lukewarm alfredo, you could only think of all that you had lost. Your tears added salt to your meal. It wasn’t as bad as the chicken. It is harder on holidays. You remember the details of the festivities. The way that the aisles would change at the store, finding shelves of fun trinkets and decorative candies. Heart shaped boxes, cliche teddy bears, things you would roll your eyes at four years ago. Things you would never imagine you’d miss. You cried often during year two. You felt regret for not appreciating the beauty that previously surrounded you. How could you have known? By year three, you had forgiven yourself. It was harder to identify emotion now. It wasn’t on the first day of the mass disappearance that you started to keep a journal. You wandered for quite a while, searching for one other human being. You journeyed through cities and small towns, keeping an eye out for a lit candle, the sound of someone playing an instrument, the smell of food being prepared. After months of nothingness, you began to write. You wrote about everything. In the absence of any conversation you spoke to yourself. You learned about yourself, and how to express the way you thought without the bounds of societal convention. For a while, it felt like freedom. Now, it feels like prison. Occasionally you wonder if you are the one who is dead. People had spoken of hell as a place that would be fiery and torturous, but you can not imagine anything worse than being so alone. You were not a perfect person, although you never thought of yourself as a bad person either. Perhaps this is just the place a soul goes to exist after it has ended it’s natural cycle. Stuck in emptiness forever. You did consider the existence of the animals, however. And, that they can be killed. How is it that another living thing could be killed in a dreamscape created of your own death? You don’t ponder such queries anymore. Valentine’s Day of year four. You arrive at the store and grab your canned corn. You add a bag of chips and a candy bar as a treat. You wonder how much longer you can remain in this desolate world. You haven’t yet tried to die, and you wonder what would happen if you did. You wonder if you could. You wonder if there is a fate worse than this. You assume that you can not try because there is a small part of you that still holds on to the hope. The hope that they will return. Your parents, your siblings, your friends, and your partner. That one day this will be nothing more than a traumatic memory you will be able to solve with a therapist. Someone you can talk to. You can not try to die because what if they returned the very next day and you weren’t there? You wonder how long you can hold on to the hope for. Valentine’s Day of year four. You wonder if you will see Valentine’s Day of year five. Or, perhaps, Valentine’s Day year one of a world returned to you.

His yellow eyes peered intently at her, as they did the first time. Unmoving, unspeaking, they sat in a space filled with the loudest silence. She knew he would not speak to her in the traditional sense. Yet, he would make her understand the truth in a way she could not convey if she were to speak one thousand words. He was a small creature, recognizable by most as a simple barn owl. His light brown feathers had no hint of mysticism. He revealed himself to few, and none ever knew why they were chosen. Sometimes, he revealed himself in moments of deep despair. He would sit on the windowsill of a young girl who had experienced a great loss, and he would comfort her. Other times he would appear in moments of wrongful joy. He knows that we create false happiness where there is none to be found, and for the unlucky few, he does not allow it. He does not appear to the ignorant, and he does not come to those who are truthful. The one he chose to reveal himself to that night was not an extraordinary person. She was not particularly kind, nor particularly cruel. She was not a genius or a dunce. Her presence was not profound. But, on that night she was chosen. He did not look at her, rather, into her. He saw her fears and her doubts. He saw the conundrum she had created for herself. She stared back into him and she told him, wordlessly, that she could not decide. It was a petty decision, of no substance to him or to most of those around her, a decision that would not affect the outcome of the world or the universe or even this insignificant woman’s life. Yet, there he sat for her. He did not sit with judgement in the way a person would. A perfect being such as himself does not have judgement; for the ability to invoke right or wrong is emotional and experiential. He does not make decisions for the ones that he chooses. He only shows them the truth. He had been with this girl in the past. Not in the same form; before, he appeared to her as a koi. She was resting by a pond at her mother’s childhood home on a day of no importance. Though he swam amongst the many, she suddenly knew him. She was struck with an awareness that she hadn’t known before. An awareness she tried to communicate to her friends, her family, to all those who would listen. But she was not a perfect being, and she could give them the awareness. This knowledge made her feel alone. She became distanced from those who loved her; she lived in a different reality, the truth. She made a conscious effort for years to forget. To go back to the unknowing. She filled her mind with materialism and the plight of mankind. She directed her attention to the decisions that didn’t matter. Earthly quandaries of no substance to her or to most of those around her. Decisions that would not affect the outcome of the world or the universe or even her insignificant life. She worked hard to forget. Eventually, she did forget. She began to live a life of ignorance once more. Some nights, she would dream of him, she would see him in all of his forms; she hoped he would never appear to her again. She hoped to never know truth in his way. Truth is far too cruel and lonely. Unfortunately for her, she has no control of truth, or of the perfect being. So he came to her again, as he often does to those who forcefully push him away. He came to her on a date of no importance, during a inconsequential drive home. He sat her in headlights, staring into her, and making all noise disappear. She no longer heard the upbeat music that had previously filled the car. The sound of her tires gliding on the asphalt grew silent, and the wind rustling the spring leaves on the trees disappeared. There he sat. His yellow eyes peering intently at her, as they did the first time. Though she tried to resist it, she was struck with the knowing. He vanished as instantaneously as he had appeared. The girl would not need another visit from him. She would walk through life with the truth, living in a reality separated from those who could know her. She was often lonely, carrying the sadness partnered to awareness. But she was not alone, for he watched her just as he watched all the others who had been chosen.