"Listen ladies, this timeline is crumbling faster than a tea biscuit. Let’s live a little."

Annette was right. We ordered another round of drinks. South Africa had disappeared off the map that morning—poof! Goodbye—and we were all feeling a little shaky. Maybe getting absolutely, royally wasted on a Friday night was what we needed.

"I don't want to be pedantic," said Corrine when the drinks arrived, "but I'm pretty certain that yesterday was also Friday."

I also had a vague memory of this, but it slipped and slid out of my brain as I tried to hang on to it. It was hard to remember things these days—everything changed so quickly that it felt like the memories never quite had a chance to solidify.

Mary Jo was sulking, twirling the little umbrella in her frilly pink drink.

"What's next, do you suppose?" she asked. "Do you think we'll all be gone, too?"

"There's no guarantee we'll actually be gone," I said. "We might wind up somewhere else."

This was an optimistic view. Most people just disappeared when things started sliding out of place, but sometimes they turned up somewhere else wildly unexpected. The previous week, the president of the United States had disappeared and reappeared as the emperor of Japan.

The waiter was back, hovering at the table. He was tall and kind of cute, and desperately seeking tips judging by the way he was hounding the table. I avoided eye contact.

Ever since the timeline had started falling apart, it was hard to make plans. Things shifted constantly: continents disappeared and new ones appeared; events happened and then reversed course just as swiftly as they started; people changed with the rapidity of a summer rainstorm. A phantom hand had pulled a vital string in the greater tapestry—things were unraveling with incredible speed. We all found ourselves wondering: when would it collapse entirely? And what would happen to us then?

I quit my job and deleted my dating apps. I mostly stayed inside in my apartment where things didn't seem to shift too much. Occasionally, like on that Friday (was it still Friday?) my friends managed to drag me out. But even being there felt like everything was starting to melt into something unrecognizable.

I sensed the waiter's eyes boring into the back of my head.

"I think he's into you, Cassie." Annette giggled. She seemed to thrive on the chaos around us. She sent news articles to the group chat daily about whatever weird shit was currently happening in the world. "'Atlantis Reappears, Fully Populated!' LOL!!!!"

I turned around to glare at the waiter. I'd had enough. I stared back into dark eyes.

"Do I know you?" I asked.

"Maybe." He shrugged.

I rolled my eyes and turned back to the table. My friends were all giving me sly looks.

"Leave me alone," I muttered. There was a low chorus of snickering before they moved on to more salient topics, such as where we were going next and whether that club still existed or if it was just a memory of a now-deleted timeline.

What's the point of love if the world is falling apart? When everything is disintegrating around you, how are you supposed to think about the rest of your life?

#

The next night (also Friday, to everyone's dismay), I was eating a frozen dinner and scrolling endlessly through cable when I came across the waiter giving an interview for a posh BBC host.  He didn't look like a waiter—he had on a beautiful suit, and his long legs were stretched out and crossed with the insouciance of a man accustomed to comfort.  

"How, then, did you know she was the one for you?" the posh host asked. He was leaning forward in his chair, chin in hand, looking utterly fascinated.

"Oh, you know," the waiter said with a dazzling smile. "A fellow just knows, doesn't he? She and I can never quite seem to escape each other's orbit."

He looked into the camera just then, with a funny little side-eyed glance that made me feel as if he was looking directly at me. I quickly turned the television off.

#

A few days later, gravity cut out.

I woke up in a cloud of blankets, floating about three feet off of the bed. From somewhere within the blanket nebula, an arm reached out sleepily and tugged me closer.

"No!"  I shouted. "Absolutely not!"

The waiter peered at me from within the cloud as I kicked off towards the door.

"Listen, I can't help it," he said, scrabbling through the air and following me out of the room. "The universe seems determined."

"No more determined than I am," I growled. I bounced down the hall, grabbing my toothbrush as it tumbled past my head. The waiter trailed after me, his gangling limbs knocking into light fixtures and making the lights spin and whirl crazily.

"Have you considered that this is happening for a reason?" he asked as I pawed at the front door of my apartment, trying not to float up to the ceiling as I fiddled with the lock. "Maybe we should, I dunno, give it a try?"

"Why?" I snapped. "There's no point. Everything is pulling apart at the seams. We can try to be together, but you could be gone tomorrow. Or I could be. Or the planet could be."  

The waiter watched silently as I stopped fussing with the door (too slow, too cumbersome to unlock when I was practically floating upside down) and went to the kitchen window instead. I pried it open and popped the screen out before crawling out and jumping.

The waiter's head craned out the window to watch me as I started floating, floating up towards the top of my apartment building.

"I think it's worth a shot," he called. "And I don't think we really have a choice.”

#

It's incredible, the kinds of things people can get used to. The world continued to disintegrate at surprising rates of speed. One day we all woke up speaking Swahili. Another day, the world had slipped into a mirror image state—everything just where we left it, but shifted and backwards. I would look in the mirror each morning and wonder, was I the same? Had I shifted into someone unrecognizable without even knowing it?

And throughout it all, I couldn't seem to escape the waiter. He was there, slipping love notes in Swahili under my door; his mirror image, out of the corner of my eye on the street, seemed to follow in my footsteps; no matter how badly the world was dumped on its head and shaken around, we always seemed to find ourselves shaken out together. 

"Yellowstone just blew up," Annette texted the group chat one Tuesday morning (a slightly smaller group chat than before—Mary Jo had disappeared one day, as if she had been simply written out. We all went to her apartment, but it was gone, the space where her cheerily painted front door had been now nothing but a wall). "And there is some kind of enormous radioactive porcupine trashing the city. The girls are fightingggggg!!! :)"

I was in my apartment with the curtains drawn. I was watching said porcupine destroying downtown on TV, bundled up in a pile of blankets. I felt like the very fabric of reality was finally, fatally tearing apart, and the only way I could fix it was by burying myself in copious quantities of fleece. The city had already been evacuated as much as possible—the highways were clogged, the sewers were full of refugees, and my choice was to die like a rat or die like a real woman, in my apartment and in my pajamas. The choice was clear.

But something was happening. On TV, a figure had appeared in front of the porcupine. It was brandishing a sword and the radioactive rodent was rearing away in fear. The news helicopters buzzed lower for a closer look.

"I THINK YOU SHOULD GIVE US A CHANCE" the waiter mouthed exaggeratedly as the camera super-zoomed into his face. He was wearing makeshift armor, but the sword had a definite Arthurian quality. The porcupine was flailing away, looking as though it was preparing to turn tail and scuttle back to whatever government facility it had escaped from.

"Give us a chance, how?" I shouted at the television. I stood up angrily, shaking off my mountain of blankets. "Give us a chance, when we don't have a chance? When nothing makes sense? What's even the point?"

"That is the point," the waiter mouthed back. He raised the sword above his head, and the porcupine truly did flee, quills sticking into skyscrapers as it rumbled out of the city. The ash clouds from Yellowstone roiled overhead, darkening the sky.

I wrapped my fleece cocoon around me and tramped out into the street, towards where the news helicopters were circling. The waiter met me in the middle, the two of us facing off in the middle of the street like gunslingers.

"This is absurd," I snapped. I felt absurd. Skyscrapers were in smoking ruins around us and I had my pink blanket drawn up to my neck like a cloak. "Look around you. The world is literally ending, and you're worried about getting a date?"

"Yeah, basically." The waiter sheathed his sword, tilting his chin up and looking just a little bit princely. "I understand that nothing makes sense, and everything is falling apart, but maybe it always has been that way. What if we just have to carry on falling in love and going to the movies and having something nice for dinner in spite of it all?"

He reached out and extracted one of my hands from my blanket shell.

"Maybe everything is for nothing," he said. "Or maybe it isn't.  But it seems like we've got more to lose if we don't try than if we do."

"I beg to differ," I said. I was trying to yank my hand away (even though it felt nice having my hand clasped in his sword-callused hands—was he even really a waiter?) without dropping all of my blankets. "If everything blows up, then I lose everything. All my hopes and dreams, dashed on the rocks. Isn't it better to not even hope for it?"

"It might not blow up."

"Or it might!"  

He pulled me closer, tugging on my arm like pulling up a fishing line.  

"Or it might not."

The hot ash cloud was blowing over the city, blacking out the sun. Refugees were peeking out from under manhole covers. I was kissing the waiter in the middle of the street.

"Things aren't looking so great," I said when we both pulled away.

"Let's find out," he said, smiling. He unsheathed his sword.  

The future looked a little brighter.