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Disillusionment
It started back in '25. I don’t remember a lot before that except that we were a few months into the second term of “the greatest president of all time," according to my dad. That was the sentiment for a lot of folks down in Texas. I, however, was indifferent to the guy during his first go-around. I didn’t really invest my attention into politics during that time; I was just focused on getting through senior year. I only really began paying attention when he was reelected. I started noticing the way he carried himself and how he spoke to others, acting like he was above everyone else and that anyone who didn’t do what he wanted was either stupid, a liar, or a traitor. I especially took notice of how he treated other countries, openly insulting other world leaders and making unreasonable demands in the name of global fairness. I quickly realized that this guy’s idea of “fair” boiled down to “if you don’t agree to my terms and my terms only, then you are the problem.” It didn’t matter what you were buying or selling from across the borders. If you didn’t want to play ball with him, trading would stop right there.
Many viewed this as a display of strength, that we were showing the other nations of the world that we didn’t need them and that doing business with America was a privilege that could be taken away. Then prices started going up. Groceries, gas, medicine. Pretty much most things the average middle-class American needed to get by became more and more costly.
Dad said I was starting to sound like a “looney liberal” from how I was talking and that university was brainwashing me. Anytime I tried to counter him with my aforementioned points, he’d tell me things like "It's all part of the plan" or "Things need to get worse before they get better." I eventually just gave up on trying to talk to him about anything regarding our commander-in-chief, and anytime he brought the subject up again, I’d just politely smile and nod to whatever he had to say, occasionally throwing in a “yup” or “uh-huh” just so he could think I was listening to his ramblings.
Being disillusioned came with the sad realization that a majority of the people living in my hometown shared the same belief as my father: that America didn’t need the rest of the world. Now, I’m not much of a religious man these days and consider myself agnostic. But I will say this: Whatever force is in charge, be it fate, the universe, or whatever, has a very cruel and twisted sense of irony.
Vanished
It was Labor Day weekend, 2025. I remember spending most of the weekend completing all my homework as soon as I could just so I could spend most of that Monday sleeping in. It was around 10:30 at night when I finished my last assignment. Back then, I considered myself a bit of a night owl, but I do recall turning in early that night, having found myself to be a tad drowsier than usual. I guess that’s what happens when you spend your weekend brute-forcing your way through 30 pages worth of study guides across four different classes.
I remember being woken up by what I initially thought was the faint sound of distant thunder. Normally, I enjoy listening to thunderstorms while I sleep, but claps of thunder usually only last a few seconds, not continuously for 7 minutes. I also noticed that the large flashes of light that normally accompany the sound of thunder weren't bursting through the wooden blinds of my bedroom window. Upon listening further, I realized that what I heard wasn’t thunder; it was gunshots. A lot of gunshots. They all sounded a good distance away from our house, thankfully, but the fact that there were so many so close together was enough reason for me to go and wake up my dad.
I immediately sprinted to my dad’s room to warn him that there was some kind of shootout nearby, taking care to stay low of any other windows I passed. When I got to his room, I could already tell that he had been up for a while, and the state I found him in shook me to my soul. He was sitting up on his bed, clutching his pillow close to his chest, his face completely pale and wet from what I could only assume were tears, and his breaths were arrhythmically erratic and shaky. His eyes, though red and puffy, were so wide with what I saw as abject terror they looked like they were going to fall out of his skull, and he was shaking more than I thought a man could. He just sat there staring at the wall in some kind of horrified trance.
Now keep in mind, my father has never been one to express his emotions. In fact, this was only the second time in my entire life that I’ve ever seen the man cry, the first being when my grandfather passed in ‘19. But this? This was different. My father looked as if his very soul had been brutally violated.
"Dad?" I said as calmly as I could muster. No response. I slowly moved towards him and gently placed my hand on his shoulder. I tried again, this time with a more firm tone.
“Dad.”
He jumped the moment my hand made contact with his shoulder. He looked dazed for a moment before his terrified eyes locked with mine.
“Keith...?” His voice was weak and dispirited. “The world… America was-- God just…” He rambled unintelligibly for about 3 minutes, constantly switching from one incohesive sentence to the next before he finally muttered something somewhat coherent. “TV… the news… I-I couldn’t watch anymore…”
I glanced over to the TV in his room, mine and my father's reflections just barely visible on the darkened screen. I noticed the remote on the floor next to the TV stand and a small dent in the wall above where the remote rested. Whatever was going on, it spooked my father so badly it made him chuck the remote at the wall. I needed to know more.
I moved toward the remote and picked it up, briefly glancing out my father’s bedroom window, noticing that what should have been the morning sun peeking over the horizon were instead giant plumes of distant smoke blocking out the skyline, clawing their way up into the heavens.
Turning my attention back towards the TV, I tentatively pressed the power button on the remote and the TV flickered to life. I was greeted by the image of a blonde newswoman sitting at a desk, mid-report on what I assumed was whatever had my father in such a disturbed state. She was in the middle of a warning about how all citizens needed to stay inside for the time being. At first, I thought we were at the beginning of another pandemic and that we needed to quarantine again. Then my eyes fell on the news ticker moving across the bottom of the screen, and my stomach dropped.
AMERICA IS NOW THE LAST NATION ON EARTH. ALL OTHER NATIONS VANISH SUDDENLY.
The smoke and gunshots outside should have clued me in that this wasn’t a new pandemic or some kind of elaborate joke, as much as I wanted to believe it was the latter. But as the woman on the screen went on to talk about scientists scrambling to find an explanation and the president’s plans to make a statement later that morning, those hopes quickly withered away into dust. It’s difficult to describe the assortment of emotions I felt all at once in that moment. All I could tell you was that they gave me a rapidly growing need to throw up.
I remember falling back onto my father’s bed as I became short of breath from the immense panic I felt in my chest. My breathing quickly grew more and more erratic, similar to my father's barely a moment ago.
I looked to my father, desperately hoping to find some sliver of reassurance from him, and he looked back at me with a combined expression of both dread and defeat.
“I’m sorry, son," he said somberly. "It's Judgment Day.”
Doubt
Judgement Day. For most of the nation, that was the idea for a while. That this was all the wrath of God and a sign we were heading toward biblical Armageddon. But a lot of people were split on what this actually meant, as many of the last remaining religious leaders believed this to be the beginning of the rapture and that America had to face tribulation because it was led into darkness by wokeness or communism or whatever; the reasons varied. Meanwhile, other leaders preached that America was and always had been the one true nation of God and that we were chosen to inherit his kingdom while the rest of the world refused to embrace American values and was damned to hell as punishment.
The thing is, I remember learning about the rapture from the book of Revelation in Sunday school, and I also recall a majority of the events that take place during the end of days are supposed to occur in the Middle East. Things like the nations of the world going to war with Jerusalem or the Euphrates River drying up were all foretold in Revelation. But none of that has happened in the Middle East yet, and now it never will because there is no Middle East anymore. It’s just ocean now. So if these prophecies can’t come true, does that discredit the existence of the Christian God? As I said before, I’m agnostic. I like to believe there’s something bigger than us out there. But if you were to ask me today, after all that’s happened, if I think that something is the Christian God, I’d definitely say no.
A couple of professionals came forward soon after to tell the world what really happened. They called it a semi-incursion. Something about a fold or a tear in our dimension’s membrane along with some other sci-fi babble I couldn’t follow. I just remember it had something to do with parallel universes. But knowing the problem and how to fix it are seldom ever the same things, as the small piece of mind the answers brought us did little to halt the shrinking edge America’s sanity now found itself on. There was no way to undo what had happened. We were literally an island, the last and only landmass on the planet Earth.
Struggling
Things only kept getting worse from there. The mass looting and rioting only lasted about a week or two. Thankfully, our family didn’t need to resort to any of that because my dad had always been a big doomsday prepper, constantly stocking up our basement with a variety of imperishables, weapons, and survival gear. He told me he had enough to keep us alive for at least two or more years, though given the unprecedented apocalypse scenario we were currently facing, we were doubtful that it was sustainable for the long term.
The National Guard had to get involved before things went relatively back to normal. Even then, there was still this palpable feeling of “where do we go from here?” that could be felt across the nation. The president bragged that we didn’t need to rely on any other country except our own and that we didn’t need to worry about making “unfair deals” with anyone overseas anymore. He seemed almost giddy as he went on to talk about how this was going to bring manufacturing back to America and how nothing could stop us from truly putting America first.
The next few years flew by pretty fast. The American people quickly learned that they were more reliant on the other countries of the world than they thought they were because, as it turns out, most of the food, oil, and pharmaceuticals that Americans used every day were imported from overseas. After about 2 years, most Americans realized that the country was consuming more than it could produce.
Some companies tried to offer a solution by taking advantage of the fact that now there was no more need for regulations on deep-sea mining or setting up oil rigs in international waters. But as oil tankers and oceanic mining vessels continued to come back each day empty-handed, the American people eventually had to accept that whatever made the rest of the world disappear took all the resources in the ocean with it. Minerals, oil, and even the fish were all gone.
By the third year, the dollar had all but collapsed, and there were shortages on practically everything an American needed to get by. Families began starving, and the sick only got sicker due to the now ludicrous prices of both food and medicine. Nearly 93% of America’s population at this time could barely afford something as simple as a microwave dinner for one. Some outspoken politicians tried to push for a redistribution of wealth or taxing wealthier individuals as a few solutions to help fix this problem, but the president just kept running his mouth about how we were all just a bunch of whiners and that America was now in its golden age and that things had never been better. He kept promising that more manufacturing plants would be built soon and that we all needed to stop complaining so much.
Do you know how long it takes plants like that to be built? A few months, sometimes even a couple years. Americans were dying, and he was calling them whiners. Now, comments like that were usually par for the course with this guy, but given the absolute horrendous state of the nation, this was the last straw for everyone on both sides of the aisle.
Revolution
Hell broke loose across the country not even 3 hours after the president had mocked the nation’s suffering. It made the civil unrest that happened at the start of all this look tame in comparison. It wasn’t just looting and rioting this time. People from all walks of life were out for blood.
Remember when I said 93% of America’s population was struggling? Well, the remaining 7% happen to be some of the richest businessmen, influencers, and Wall Street bros in America. These were the kind of people who believe those less fortunate need to apply themselves more to get ahead. These were also the kind of people who, rather than use their wealth and abundance of resources to help their fellow Americans, would rather continue sitting in their lavish houses watching Netflix in their personal theater room while their personal chef cooks them a Michelin Star meal. And, despite the many bodyguards some of these individuals have, they weren’t much good against the numerous mobs of angry, starving nearby townsfolk looking to kick down the doors of the many mansions and penthouse suites across the nation who have decided that there is no longer a peaceful solution for survival. Needless to say, there weren’t a lot of one-percenters left after that week.
While some state officials condemned the events of that week, others saw this as a sign that, no matter what happens, the president had no intention or plan to truly fix this, especially after he declared martial law to get the “riffraff” in order. It wasn’t long before states like California and Texas decided to break off into their own nations in response. Many other states attempted to do the same soon after, but our president, being the petty little control freak he is, decided that the multiple state secessions taking place across the nation were acts of treason. So, once again, he sends the national guard into these states to “hold the traitors accountable.” But one thing led to another, and now we are in the middle of a second civil war. Which brings us to today.
Hubris
At the time I am writing this, it is currently June 2nd, 2030. I am currently sitting comfortably in the bomb shelter my dad and I built in our backyard some time ago. Our president refused to step down after his term ended in ‘28; he said doing so at that time would “be the greatest threat to national security in history." But it didn’t really matter in the end, because the moment the Western Resistance broke down the White House doors, the guy had already launched a nuke at California, and California immediately retaliated by firing their own nuke at D.C., instantly annihilating everyone involved. Now my dad and I spend our days in the shelter, doing what we can to survive the ongoing nuclear winter. Though I'm pretty sure age will catch up with my old man before he gets a chance to see this through to the end, if there is one. I’ve made my peace with that.
I’ve decided to write this in the hopes that the survivors who are left, if there are any, find this after I’m gone and learn from the mistakes made by the people of my time. I hope that by reading this, they are inspired to build the new world on a foundation of humility, rather than one of pompous arrogance and entitlement disguised as patriotism. Because that’s what got us here in the first place. Sure, the rest of the world suddenly vanishing overnight may have played a big part in that, but ultimately that’s not what did us in. You can thank American hubris for that.