[ OT ] Sunday Free Write : Happy Holidays Edition !

Not with a Whimper 
 I wonder who will find this. Perhaps nobody will, as the sensors indicate that I ’ m currently traveling at a thousand and five hundred meters per second, hurtling through the endless expanse of space. Maybe some of humanity will have survived, and this will be considered classical literature someday, by an older, wiser world. Or Aliens will pick this up. You never know. 
 Maybe I should explain my predicament. I am an astronaut on a mission to the international space station. My mission was to assist the crew in the maintenance of the station, and stay there for six months. A simple, routine orbital mission. Nothing new to me. I didn ’ t think that anything would go wrong up there. 
 The world ended that day. I changed course, out running the remnants of the planet that was once the home to everyone I ever knew, panic clouding my mind. What am I going to do? I thought to myself. I still don ’ t know the answer to that question. 
 I suppose you want to know how the world ended. Disappointment here, I ’ m afraid. I don ’ t know. All I ’ m sure of is what I saw. I saw the entire earth go up in flames. Fires large enough to be seen a hundred miles up. The blue of the globe lost, crimson filling everything. That bright, burning red will haunt me forever. After a lifetime on a planet that never sleeps, nothing really prepares you for the silence that follows. There is no radio. There is no comforting blue marble to stare at. There is only darkness and silence, holding nothing at all. An endless space filled with nothing. They say, when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back. I have been peering out the cockpit for days now, hoping for something. But nothing is staring back. 
 Everything ends. I soon will. I hope people remember, if there are people left, that this is how the world ended. Not with a whimper, but with a bang.
