End of the world? Not yet

It's a pity the world did not end the other day. It was my only way to salvation as I have maxed out my credit cards.

I got up on Saturday, May 21, the day of the Apocalypse, looked out of the window, heard the birds chirping, and sighed a deep sigh. "It was good while it lasted," I said to myself.

For most of my life it has been the usual same old routine.

I get up in the morning, go to work, check my email, text my friends, come home, fight with my wife over money and watch TV soap opera reruns till I crash out on the sofa.

On the weekends, I change the routine a little bit so as to make it interesting. I crash out on the sofa in the morning after breakfast and by noon I get a pillow face. Then I check my email, text friends and fight with my wife and then we go grocery shopping.

I know other people have a great life, a life full of promises for the future but rooted in the here and now. Some of them have adventures. They go out into the lovely, stark and spiritual desert and get lost and have to be airlifted by a helicopter. They learn new skills such as playing the violin and making the cat tone-deaf.

Everyone has a full life, except me, so I thought the end of the world was a good idea. I had spread out my credit cards on the bed on that fateful day. These were my prized possessions. With these cards my dull life had turned a little interesting.

I could buy stuff. I could satiate my inner craving, on credit. They say that capitalism has made us heartless and has created a void in our souls. But with one of these cards I had bought something I always cherished, a new compressor for my car air-conditioner. It was a wonderful to be air-conditioned in a car once again. It had conked out on purpose just as the heat started building up.

I looked closely at the beautiful hologram on the back of the card and ran my fingers over the 16 numbers and my name in raised letters. This was my identity, this is who I am, I thought to myself, ungrammatically.

They say that your whole life flashes before your eyes when you are drowning. The end of the world is not the same thing as drowning, but I started to remember some of the good moments in my life. I remembered the amazing tuna sandwich with capers I had in Umm Al Quwain.

Then I got worried. It was getting to be near noon and no sign of any great upheavals from the ground, no shaking of my fridge or dogs howling or cats spitting, as they are the first to sense that something is wrong.

I checked Twitter and someone said that it was all supposed to end by 6 pm. I had a couple of hours to kill so I drove my car to the car wash and checked the oil level.

"You know the world's going to end today," I told my son. "Yeah, whatever," he said, pulling the earphone bud out of his ear. He didn't care because his world had already ended. The final exams days have been announced.

My wife couldn't be bothered whether the world ended or not. She was on deadline to mark the papers of her students and she was chuckling as she was reading through, though she looked wasted.

Can I treat you to nice dinner at a place of your choice? I asked her. She checked my forehead. "There's a lot of this going around," she said, and suggested that I take an ibuprofen.