Critical Tissue

It’s lonely out here. A post-apocalyptic desertscape.

I am the last of my kind, a dying, nearly-dead breed. Parched, dust-covered. Who knows how long this weary frame has left?

Holding on, however tenuous the grip, to a knowledge that, it appears, will follow me to my grave. An endangered species of an idea. A language waiting to be lost.

My feet drag, my breath flags beneath the burden of being the last-known person with this skillset. I carry my own Library of Alexandria like Atlas steadies the earth, my spine warped and torqued, groaning with a sag like a shelf too weak for its books.

How will my children fare? Can they survive? What world am I leaving behind for them? How have I failed to pass this critical knowledge on to them? Will they forgive me? Will the world?

The anxiety and guilt of knowing, somehow, I have failed, I have not given them the tools they need.

I swear—in my fog-addled, rusty-cogged brain and by my exhausted—that there’s a faded memory of doing so or something quite like it, if I just reach a little farther down, there’s a memory of….of…

…it fades…

I fade.

Could this be it?

Yes. It could.

It is.

And, just like that, the toilet paper roll in our house will never be replenished again.