They said the world would end in 2012. Nobody believed them. It had something to do with the Mayan calendar, I heard. I ignored the signs. But then again, there was no way to prepare for what was coming to me. Destruction. Pain. Loss. Suffering. I wasn’t stuffing can after can of Progresso in my basement; I wasn’t abandoning all plans for my future. Not like some Mayan-worshipping-apocalypse-fearing whack jobs, ready to believe anything they read in some cheap tabloid at the grocery checkout.

It started on New Year’s Eve. A party at my best friend’s house. We didn’t go to the same high school, but I recognized some middle school faces. However, most of the faces belonged to familiar aliens, imported from the high school across town. There was a guy who seemed to be going out of his way to end up near me. It was reaching the point of stalkerdom when I decided to talk to him. The exchange of phone numbers, an hour of “getting-to-know-you’s”, and two weeks later we had a date.

I didn’t have high hopes for this relationship. Little did I know that I would fall head-over-heels for this guy. He was the Romeo to my Juliet, the Edward to my Bella. I saw him in my dreams, every waking moment revolved around him. I had no cares for anyone or anything else in this world, I just wanted to be with him.

Turns out he didn’t feel the same way. On New Year’s Eve, 2012, my new life began. On December 21st, reality harshly woke me up, tearing me from the one thing I held dear. I began the plummet into nothingness. I had seen the signs, but I chose to live in ignorance. Sweet, lovely ignorance. All I received was a text saying, “Goodbye,” and it was all over. My soul, so swollen from the elated emotions inside me, burst like a popped balloon.

While all those who believed that today was their last day, and were happy to still be alive rejoiced, I lived a different reality. The buildings crashed down, like dominoes, one after another. Water pushed through the floodgates, and the storm of tears began. Fires spontaneously broke out where the water had not yet reached. The sounds of sirens rang, then became muffled as the water drowned them. Tornadoes spun, volcanoes erupted, hurricanes raged. There was nothing I could do, no way to escape my personal hallucination that was becoming more and more real with each passing second.

Nobody could rescue me from this horror movie, except for one person. But that person was long gone.