Day 2089. I’m on cooking duty today. Cooking was my favourite shift but getting out of bed is taking a lot of effort.

Well, if you can call bed to a musty sleeping bag with holes on the outer layer.

Today’s menu will be: boiled potatoes. Perhaps there’s be a prune for dessert. Most likely not.

I hear the rain pounding against the dirty windows. More rain is the last thing we need. The walls of the abandoned building that we’d managed to enclosed in safety were already full of dump. It was now the end of September and the nights were getting colder. Even wrapped in my blanket in the sleeping bag I could feel the cold settling in my bones. There’s no way we can spend the winter in here, we’d have to move out soon. I’m not sure what I find less enticing: the prospect of a freezing winter or another move.

We haven’t had any nasty surprises over the past few weeks, yet I keep waking up filled with dread. The calm feels unnatural, as if it’s only a forewarning of something terrible to come. It’s like in horror films when there’s nothing scary happening yet, but the music starts to escalate and that’s how you know it’s coming. Every minute feels like that, it’s exhausting.

Believe it or not, the constant anxiety is not even the worst part. The boredom is. Hours and hours go by without nothing to do. We have a few books that everyone has read five or six times over. John has a deck of cards, which after playing for a few hours straight you don’t want to see in at least a week.

Actually no, the boredom is not the worst. The lack of hope is. We survive day after day knowing that nothing will change. There’s always that tiny little bit of your mind that thinks: perhaps there’s more people out there, smart people, people with a plan. This micro dosis of hope only makes the disappointment at the end of the day harder, and reality more painful. If there’s more survivors, they’re surely in the same desperate situation that we’re in.

I look out the window, it seems that the rain is slowing down. Between two dark clouds, a bright blue gap starts opening. The rain hasn’t fully stopped yet and a shy rainbow pops up halfway the parting clouds. Almost against my will, I can’t stop my own sad smile from greeting the beautiful arc.

I’ll ask John for a game of cards today.