Reliving An Apocalypse (and making your ex regret everything)

Part 1

The moment Leia opened her eyes the ample embrace of mother sun near blinded her. 

It wasn't that the world was completely dark after the apocalypse, but it might as well be; almost the entirety of the sun was constantly--if not always-- partially covered--  shining weakly to light up the world in what is a dim glow on a rainy day.

It was too bright now: abnormally so, for it was only during the twenty days of summer each year that the light in mornings would be just as bright, but it was also during those twenty days that water would dry out from creeks, leaving the flesh of corpses-- dead from dehydration-- melted like tar into gravel. 

She gasped painfully, inhaling rapidly, as though she could barely catch enough to fill her lungs. 

There was no longer the cave-- the dirt, the darkness, the emptiness in her chest-- 

and she was not on the ground; neither the laid tiles in the southern wing nor that of a thin tent-- 

She was on a bed. 

For a second she had felt paranoia-- some disorientation, almost frantic, as she sat on the white sheets, her back soaked in cold sweat, crawling through the muddle of her brain for a single inkling of the reality she instead now faced. 

When she could see clearly again, she noticed two pots of cascade succulents from a beige wall and tiny dusters dancing in front of a brown desk, some papers and cien años de solidad laying flat on the surface-- a book she had worked through with some ardent determination years back, having only gotten to the fourth generation of the bilious ancestry when the end of the world arrived.

The scenery was too familiar: too strange, perhaps, but the paradox seemed to make sense in all of its context. It was as though she had been plunged into a scene from a specific daydream: a childhood memory, a good piece of nostalgia that someone would hold dear in their hearts. 

It was too good to be true, though, so Leia did the first thing she could think of: she sat up, walked to her desk, and plunged a screwdriver into her forearm. When the blood trickled from tore skin and she felt sharp pain biting her nerves, she realized the thing she'd been praying God to fulfill for an entirety of two thousand, one hundred and twenty-eight days. 

She was back in her room. 

She rummaged through her almost unfamiliar room for her phone, grabbing it in the bathroom by the charger before opening the screensaver to see the electronic date blaring on the screen:

June 3rd, 2010. 

Three days before the start of the apocalypse.

A part of her broke down: she sat, on the porcelain ground, for what was almost an hour and a half, wordlessly staring up at the wall in front of her. 

She'd have wished for her life to go back to normal, true, but this was not what she'd expected. 

If you'd have lived through six years of an inevitable nightmare, how would you cope with the fact that you'd have to live through it again? 

Those novels about reincarnations and a protagonist reliving out their lives gloriously-- she thought-- was bullshit. How could a person endure such terrors, be brought back to the same timeline and have to live with the knowledge of having to do it all again?

For the very same reason, Leia laid in her bed until sundown-- when she was so hungry she could no longer stand it, then stumbled up to the kitchen in her studio apartment and picked out a box of leftover Chinese takeout.