There was once a man, so deeply convinced that the world was against him, that he locked himself in his home and refused to ever leave it.
“I no longer belong to the world,” he told to anyone who came near his domain. “Just as the world disowned me, I disowned it.” Passerby would smile and nod, friends would shrug and let him continue to rant, and strangers would cross the side of the road to avoid his tangents. To him, that was fine. He saw no value in needing an audience to speak, so he espoused them to the skies and the trees and valleys and on every set of deaf ears on the continent.
“I look at the earth and see nothing of worth to me,” the man sad to no one in particular.
Years passed as the man shut himself out from everything – life passed by, lives passed on, lands changed and winds swept, all while this solitary man lived an existence alone, subsisting on only what was grown in his garden. Time moved on until all life had been extinguished on the earth through many wars and heavy pollution.

The man was finally truly alone. For the first time in years, a smile crept across his aged, wrinkled face. Victorious and vindicated, he made his first excursion out into the world past his estate. Decades of entropy had rusted the framework of the world, and buildings had crumbled. For the most part, the end of the world had did quite a number on mother earth, and what remained sat battered in stripped down repose. It bothered him not to see skeletons in the streets, tumbleweeds in the roads, and craters where great monuments once stood – he never cared for them back when it even mattered.
“I'm no longer an exile on my own land,” the man said to no one in particular, thoughtfully combing through his beard. He kicked aside an empty gasoline can, theorizing ways in which he could expand his garden despite the dead soil around him. Some of this stuff had to still work.
After this, the lonesome man spent much of his time over the months scavenging for additions to his garden, mapping out trails and paths still left over from years past, and gloating to himself about his great fortune and foresight.
“I wish I could see the faces on those suckers,” the man said to no one in particular. “Let them know I won in the end.”
One particularly foggy morning, the man found himself roaming through the rocky canyons that had once been a grassy knoll filled with a proud, beaming ecosystem. Full of strength and power, it had now become mostly a pile of bones. He had crossed over a bridge of rotting wood to a dried river where he had spied, for the first time, something alive – a tiny Bonzai tree, held up in a ceramic pot with a plaque next to it.
Upon further inspection, the man could lift the tree and pot, but the plaque was too smudged and dirty to discern down in the dried-up riverbed. Resolving to take it back to his estate, the man carried this tiny Bonsai tree – this one small, still surviving thing – over the bones, and broken bridges, and empty dusty highways and cracked roads all the way back to the garden, where after some effort he was able to clean the plaque enough to make out what was engraved on it.

TO THE LAST MAN ON EARTH, it began. WELCOME BACK, WHENEVER YOU RECEIVE THIS.
WE CAN'T PREDICT HOW YOU'RE REACTING TO THE EVENTS AND THE NEW WORLD AROUND YOU – YOU MAY BE SAD, ANGRY, OR SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY. WE CAN'T ASK FOR FORGIVENESS OR SALVATION – YOU'RE JUST ONE MAN, YOU COULDN'T GIVE US THAT TO BEGIN  WITH.
ALL WE ASK IS THAT, IF YOU SEE THIS – PLEASE DON'T FORGET ABOUT US.
SINCERELY,
THE WORLD.

The man sat down in the grass and stared at this Bonsai tree, and thought about how long it may have been there, and what it had survived and seen and remembered. After a moment, his eyes lit up, and he sighed, resigned.

“I may have disliked you,” the man said to no one in particular. “But I'll carry your memory as long as I live.”