The world is ending. I’ve been stuck on that phrase, and different iterations thereof: the world is ending, the world wasn’t ending, the world felt as if it was ending for a split second and all the hairs on my skin stood up straight like prickly soldiers in a line, silent and waiting. I often feel this way. It’s a professional diagnosis, this haunting specter of foreshadowing. The window’s warped a little, leaves warbling on the trees as my perspective moves.

When I was six years old, Tennessee flooded. My dad and brothers were out of town at the time, leaving my mom and me alone when the creek down the road crested its banks and waves began rising above our doorstep and seeping into the tile hallway, pooling beneath our feet. We made it a game, my mom and I, jumping around, playfully frantic, like children playing Titanic in the bathtub as we covered the ground first with towels, then blankets when we ran out of towels, then sheets when we ran out of blankets. Luckily, the water never quite reached the carpet and had mostly receded by the time the boys got home. At least, that’s how I remember it.

Of course, it’s hard not to feel like the world is ending when we just had the hottest summer on record and our country is about to decide between a senile geriatric and a — brace yourself — woman. The horror. But is this a different kind of feeling? Not the creeping dread of a world slowly devolving from its natural order, but instead the sudden surety that it was like this the whole time, and you simply didn’t notice till now. Or, perhaps that you alone — and the world that is your own — have fallen apart, leaving you in the liminal space that is reality without its conceptual framework. Bare and raw, a newborn without her mother, and just as likely to survive. Bouts of sickness, or madness, or truth, from which I come out the other end as if from a dream, like it never happened at all.

Speaking of dreams: I was in my grandmother’s lake house. Except instead of being on the slowly inclining shore of a man-made lake in the middle of the Pocono Mountains, it was hanging off the cliffside of some valley leading straight out into the ocean, suspended so you could look through the glass balcony doors to see the beach miles below. Or, you would be able to, if the ocean hadn’t been gradually advancing upwards in massive tidal waves, crashing against the sides of the valley and the cliff below us in white water drafts, till it reached the balcony and began rising against the door. It leaked into the house relatively slowly, but I was frantically lining the door frame with towels anyways, as my mom chatted away in the kitchen on the phone, completely oblivious. I called for help, but she didn’t respond. The water was waist height now, and for a moment, it seemed to calm. The tidal waves turned into a gentle back and forth against the doors, and I felt like I was at the aquarium, peering through the glass at an environment half land and half sea, looking at three worlds at once. That’s when I woke up.

I’ve always been fascinated by doomsday survivalists, Adventists, and Millerites. They all seemed to have the same thing in common: this certainty of the end, this anxiety which takes over their life, hinging it all on one apocalyptic story. As someone who also constantly lives with the feeling that the world is about to end, I tend to go about it very differently, though that might have more to do with the fact that my dread has been diagnosed. At the same time, I’m not convinced theirs couldn’t be too. Instead of hoarding food and toilet paper, or preaching at strangers’ doors to save them, when my world ends, sometimes I let it. I sit and watch it all implode alone in my room, because there’s an inevitability to this pain — the sense, as with all things, that it must come in order to pass. Eventually, however, you have to reach out, build the strength to lift a hand out of the water, and find something to hold on to.

Maybe the world will end. The Monongahela and Allegheny rivers will spill over their banks till the streets of Pittsburgh are running with foul-smelling water, and maybe I’m right, and the man leaning against the balcony railing across the street has a fishing pole in his hand instead of his phone. Or maybe I should be wearing my glasses.