The end of time writer

 The day was already here, behind the closed shutters. His wife was asleep, or trying to catch up on some of the late hours of respite. He sat silently in front of his computer on the dining room table, as he did every day when he was off work. For decades now, he had been blacking out notebook pages or filling Word pages with stories that nobody was interested in. As far back as he could remember, he had always been a storyteller. As a child, he would keep his classmates in suspense by telling them about movies he had never seen. He had even been expelled from the canteen in kindergarten because he distracted his classmates by talking incessantly. The school essay had always been his favorite exercise, in spite of the choice of subjects or the final grade that rarely met his expectations. In the solitude of his childhood days as an only child, he would sit in front of the hallway mirror and tell himself memories and advice as the old man he was not yet. He had spent his whole life waiting to get the old man's face that matched the age of his soul. Seers had told him that he had been a Brahmin, that this explained his taste for books, that he was indeed an old soul, and so on. He had read that old souls often lived lives devoted to their passions, without worrying too much about the material consequences or the worldly comments that this might bring.

He didn't know anything about his past lives, but what he did know was that he was a failed writer, a poor man who made his family live in misery. He had barely survived a series of odd jobs in which he did not shine. He wrote books that no one read, but he didn't know how to do anything else.

At the age of fifteen, he had started reading a large dictionary. If he finished reading it and still wanted to be a writer, that would be his vocation, he told himself. As soon as he finished reading the dictionary, three years later, he began writing the book that would launch his career. While looking up a dictionary of literary themes, he came across this quote from William Shakespeare under the letter A: "Abandon those who abandon themselves. "It took him another two or three years to deliver his first manuscript. The story of the book was that of a young man happily in love, promised a brilliant career, who threw everything away to embark on an adventure. It was already a cry for freedom, an act of rebellion against all the conditioning of life. This theme was to be the guiding thread of his work. Once the manuscript was completed, he presented it to his parents as a trophy. They had not read it, implicitly making him understand that it would be better for him to find a real job. He had presented the manuscript to a publishing house which had returned a non-receipt.

He had left home, decided to live the adventure, failing to shine in a writing career. Then the hazards of life had brought him back to his country. He had founded a family there, the only successful episode in a life of misery, accumulating uninteresting jobs and social decline, until he ended up in a low-rent apartment in a poor town.

One day, he came across a young man's YouTube channel who was passionate about prophecies, some of which dated back to biblical antiquity. All these prophecies converged on civil wars in Europe and the Middle East and an imminent nuclear apocalypse in Europe and the United States. He knew well the actors of this chaos: globalist elites and servants of the deep state. He had spent much of his time studying these people, their plans, their methods and their crimes. Soon, the idea of the catastrophe, of its imminence, had obsessed him. Everything was there, the whole geopolitical course was clearly laid out. The outcome was obvious. 

Of course, his entourage was quick to point out all the random events that would cancel out this disastrous fate. He did not argue. He had had these visions of civil war since childhood. Around him, the declining West was living the last days of an exclusively consumerist civilization. People were no longer thinking, they were consuming, even if the atmosphere was a bit gloomy.

Few people read the prophecies with attention. Prophecies were either sensationalist magazine articles or fanatical exhortations to try to scare people into a questionable reading of the biblical message.

He believed he had the power to produce short stories, free of the usual prophetic jargon, to inform at least some people about prophecy and its troubling contemporary fulfillment. The age was no longer able to listen to the words of the mystics, but everyone had the right to be informed. Everyone was free to make up his own mind and to direct his life in the direction he wanted, with full knowledge of the facts.