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.