^{We are preparing for the wrong disaster. —Chris Begley, The Next Apocalypse}

The year I was born, the Soviet Union’s  
early warning radar system malfunctioned,  
reporting five intercontinental ballistic  
missiles in flight: a preemptive nuclear  
strike. You may have heard this story.  

How a single lieutenant colonel dismissed  
the signal as the false alarm that it was …  
but had he made a different call  
in that moment? Had he seen those five  
ghost fingers as a fist? A mushroom cloud:  

the most dangerous cliché. I hold it
in my hands on my fortieth birthday and  
it becomes a bouquet: a thousand stems  
leading to a thousand worlds in which cooler  
heads did not prevail, to a thousand  

alternate universe versions of me, born  
in the year of the apocalypse. I see myself …  
dead via radiation poisoning. Dead via  
the shutdown of the supply chain, the failure  
of the water system, the reemergence  

of previously preventable diseases. Dead  
in such manly ways: via an unlucky fall  
in a fistfight over nothing. Via a scratch,  
ignored and infected. I plucked petals, looking  
for a version of me who survives. Hoping  

to find that … you know: leather jacket,  
black motorcycle, katana strapped to my back  
version. That warrior poet, lone vessel of  
vengeance, keeping the wasteland’s unending 
tide of razor-clawed mutants at bay version.  

All these dead worlds, and he isn’t out there. 
All these visions of who I could have been, 
and not a single hero: folk, super, anti 
or otherwise. In one life, I wore a suit of armor 
and drowned in the river. In one life, I hoarded  

food and choked on it. In one life, the basement 
was so full of boxes of bullets—a tornado came 
and I had nowhere to go. No shelter. I emptied 
clip after clip into the wind. All these dead 
worlds, and we tell the same stories.  

Which is not to say that I never survive. Just 
that my survival, in every reality where it is 
possible, never belongs to me. I see myself: 
forty. Not a dual-wielding bandit warlord. Just a
neighbor, sitting in another endless community  

meeting. And how many of our ancestors have
already taught us: even after the world ends, 
there is work to do. I see myself in that work: not 
the leader, not a lone wolf, just another part of the
pack. Because in every universe in which  

I am alive, it is because of other people. And I 
don’t always like them, but I love them. In every 
universe in which I am alive, it is less because I 
could fight, and more because I could  
forgive. Because I could cooperate. Because  

I could apologize. Because I could dance. Because 
I could grow pumpkins in my backyard and leave 
them at my neighbor’s door, asking for nothing in
return. In every universe in which I am alive, I am
holding: a first aid kit, a solar panel, a sleeping

cat. Never a rusty battle ax or rocket launcher—
sure, maybe sometimes a chainsaw, but only for 
firewood. I am holding: a cooking pot, a teddy bear, 
a photo album, a basketball, a bouquet of flowers.
Survival is not a fortress. It is a garden. 

Survival is not a siren. It is a symphony. And
yeah, we fight for it sometimes, but survival is not
the fight. It is the healing after: the soft hum of
someone you trust applying the bandage, the
feeling of falling asleep in a safe place.