App-ocalypse : A short story about the end of the world

 Day 8

It's been a week since it happened. Everything crumbled and now people walk the streets with grey faces and empty hands. The nights are long and quiet, too quiet. The light of day is so unfamiliar, I'm used to a soft blueish glow from my screens and I've only ever gotten a tan from a sunbed  so the warm light unsettles me. Nothing and no one is safe. I feel so alone here, not sure what I should eat and if everyone around me is alive every morning. I wish I could see the sunrises and sunsets again. I feel like I didn't appreciate all the amateur photographers who had blogs full of them. No more I guess. 

There are more stars in the smoggy sky than on my Twitter. 

Day 19

I had to pay with my Marc By Marc Jacob for Marc Jacobs sunglasses to get a full tank of fuel. They don't accept any cards here at this dingy station and everyone knows carrying cash is something I wouldn't do. I've had to leave the city, there was no hotline blinging for me there. My missed calls are sitting at a thousand. The city is good for people who can do manual labour but I have a weak wrists and a deviated septum so I can't make a living there. I need to go somewhere with reception so I can promote weight loss pills on Instagram again, I made the best money then. Now, 27k people don't know what I ate for breakfast, which is just as well because I had carbs. Perish the thought. No one can see the state of my hair because my metallic ombré is washing out and I can't contact Marcel my stylist anymore. She had a child and I don't know if her clients are still giving her a 5 star rating anymore. 

There is more human kindness in this mainstream food outlet than the hearts in my notifications. I don't know where to eat anymore, all the hidden pop up resturants have gone underground and all that's left are McNuggets. I need a McHugget. Darn. That would have been such a good tweet. 

 

Day 20

I lied to myself when I left the city. I need to go back, I need to find a cronut. I need to have artisanal flour on my ciabatta. Someone offered me ice cream from a shop, I screamed because no one seems to hand churn their ice cream here. My parents don't seem affected by the disaster. They're acting like nothing happened so I had to leave and go back. My flatmate could have had a party I didn't know about. My new friend is called Iris, which is so cool because it's like Siri backwards, so I call her Siri for laughs and she thinks it's so funny. She has dementia or Alzheimer's or something I couldn't look up because she's always writing things down in a notebook. It's so vintage I die. But it probably is a medical condition because she keeps shaking and talking about a cold turkey and wanting to see Mary Jane and Milly or Molly again. Anyway I'm giving Iris a lift back to the city .

Iris has this gorgeous retro MacBook that she takes everywhere so she doesn't lose the photos that she has. She was telling me about her job, which she thought I would be able to do but I spaced out because the ocean looked like something out of Tumblr, with some amazing filter that I soon realised was my sunglasses that I ended up getting to replace my bartered Marc By Marc Jacob for Marc Jacobs sunglasses. She blogs or promoted events or something. Couldn't care about it because I just remembered what happened and I'm not sure how to carry on.

Iris wanted to try a diner but we couldn't possibly go near it because what if it had a bad Yelp review? I'm not reckless, I can't take risks like that, you know? 

I wish I had a quote to caption my pain right now

Day 22 

I keep waiting to hear a buzz. It's just my imagination. Iris checks in on me now and again through a landline, which I didn't know I had. I was out getting food from one of the few places I can remember and I saw this guy who was so orange from fake tan and he had some really intense acne, it was like pizza leprosy I die. I could never be seen in public if I got pizza leprosy.  

Imagine if pizza leprosy was a thing though? Could it be a hashtag? I don't know. oMG. I said a whole phrase when I could have been like "idk". I hate how this is right now. I'm in Starbucks and I heard a couple talking about something viral going around and I hope it isn't a cat playing the trombone because that would be so sad. I'd have a Sylvia Plath quote for how I feel about my latte (it's not pumpkin spiced, it's a Courgette Stir Fried latte), because I don't know how to feel about it. I don't know how other people feel about it. 

I keep waiting for someone to come looking for me, I feel so alone, I don't know how to contact anyone. My mother joked that I could have learned my friend's numbers. Jeez, I don't even know if people are getting older. I don't know if there are parties that I could have clicked "Interested" to. 

The world is just this vast empty place. I cannot wait for the end of this pain. I cannot endure more. 

Day 1 

Dear Diary, 

My phone broke. It's a disaster, the store says I have to wait 3- 4 weeks for a replacement. Gonna see if my parents will get me a new one before then. Ugh why is my life like this?  It's the end of the world

A letter for the lobotomised

Greetings my dear companions (and my not so dear ones too)

In an age of spellcheck, Twitter-Wit and this abundance of enlightenment (or some vague notion that we are better off than our predecessors) I find it tragic that we still are plagued with a certain issues. This is my pep-talk for this year in a bid for my contemporaries to "up their game" (and their grammar). 

[Image via 9gag.com]

It is NOT 2007 anymore. We all have QWERTY keyboards on our phones- spellcheck and predictive  text are a free and active feature (I actually used the latter twice in the last sentence). And I'm not pointing fingers at the people who say "U" as opposed to "you", I understand the purpose of that fully. Instead it's "yew peeples wu aRe d01nG diż tôö meeee" (translation: you people who are doing this to me)

Typing that made my eyes burn. Reading it makes them bleed.

Why? 

That's all I ask you. It takes you twice as long to type with letters that have dots, accents and hearts and most rational people have NO clue what you mean. A yew is a tree, it's also the same length as the word you. I would like to show you a yew, with my ewe grazing beneath it. There is no need to personalise English. 

Why must you butcher this language that I love so very much? This attempt to be cool and "modern" has left much to be desired.  You bludgeon the grammar and starve your vocabulary until all that you express are monosyllables. Furthermore you choose to spread this moronic use of English to other people via social media and your social interaction with us.  This leaves me discombobulated and my eyes glaze over with sadness. This spoken and written word fills my soul with euphoria and I feel my heart become engorged with the prose of those who understood it's beauty.  How do you begin to detail the spectrum of your sentiments and how can you justly express it without these words? When did stupidity become trendy? 

Can we fix this? I'm pretty sure I can hear the 2008 Obama campaign saying, "Yes, we can!" to this query.  Read a book, a blog(this one is pretty nice, I think), a magazine or even… (Dare I say it?) A newspaper. We all make mistakes, you're meant to learn from your mistakes. When I was 14 and new on Facebook with a phone that had an alphanumeric keyboard, I used to shorten words occasionally in my wall posts to get the message across faster. I didn't bastardise the language with alternate spelling, "you= u" when I was in a hurry.Now I am 18, older and wiser. Many of my peers have not grown this way.

 You don't have to be the next Jane Austen but at least write in a manner that people understand. Its not cute or quirky so whoever told you that texting like you've been lobotomised was adorable, they lied.Don't sabotage yourself by creating an impression of being a total moron. 

Intelligence is the ultimate allure. End of story.