Eve wasn't sure how long she'd been sitting on her porch, breathing in the pine, absorbed in her thoughts, but the singing birds and the always comical bray of a neighbor's donkey were soothing, so she stayed there, quiet, not moving for fear the noise would resume its taunting assault.
In the days following the Texas event, the cracks in society's Stepford-like serenity were too wide and too many to ignore. Random acts of petty bullshit were once again on the rise, as though people were making up for lost time.
That was the emotional whirlwind, the desperation and depression, Eve was feeling.
History had taught her that, once she realized her misery was not her own, Eve knew how not to drown in it.
Like the emotional fishing net that she innately was, Eve had unknowingly flung herself into the collective zeitgeist and was scooping up the bottom-dwelling breakdowns of a frazzling population.
Her over-achieving sense of empathy emerged, Eve reckoned, at about the same time she emerged from her mother's womb in 1970.
She'd always been described as a "sensitive" child. That's what they called most empaths back in the '70s . Her intense concern for the feelings of the smallest of things -- Pet Rocks were her misunderstood babies, and don't even mention the genocide that came from her package of freeze-dried Sea Monkeys -- was seen as a delightful testament to Eve's budding imagination.
Every year growing up, Eve insisted on choosing the scraggliest, most-likely-to-be-firewood tress from the Christmas lots. She'd spend hours making them beautiful with individual strands of tinsel, sparkling lights, and cherished family ornaments. To this day, though she hadn't decorated a tree in decades, Eve swore Charlie Brown's tree was more glorious than any they'd ever dragged into Rockefeller Center.
By the time her tween years hit, along with the neon revolution that was the '80s, Eve's life goals were set: Be a writer; be a mom; and experience the kind of love Barbra Streisand had with Kris Kristofferson in A Star Is Born.
Well, Eve often told herself, at least she got one of them right.
She was never able to get pregnant -- not for a lack of trying.
And Eve picked her men like she picked her Christmas trees. It took her a lifetime to realize you can make them sparkle all you want, but, unlike an unloved pine, devotion, attention, and a handful of tinsel won't transform a man.
Again, an almost masochistic level of trying went into learning that painful lesson.
Eve was never a casual dater.
From her angst-filled high school years, she had fully immersed herself in one toxic long-term relationship after another. She didn't just beat dead horses. Eve mourned their deaths and then resurrected them with her beatings, only to bury the bastards again.
After two spectacularly failed marriages -- Eve was never one for doing things by halves -- she admitted to herself that she sucked at love. Micky Dolenz was wrong. True love didn't exist for the vast majority of people, and for those who, like her parents, did find it, it always, inevitably ended in heartbreak, because everyone, eventually, dies.
She was done pretending it would turn out any differently for her, so she was, she resolved, fucking done with love.
And then she met Donnie.
Ahhh, Donald, the batshit-crazy love of Eve's unorthodox life.
That was the novel Eve could never bring herself to write. She wasn't naive enough to believe a happy ending could still come from that devastating wreckage, but writing it would mean reliving it, and she wasn't sure she could endure that.
YOU ARE READING
Darkness Descending
Paranormal2030: Ten years after COVID, empath Eve thought humanity was finally in harmony. Then Darkness appeared and told her why the world was ending... again.
