a long long time

post-apocalyptic love stories are the best love stories.

*a few spoilers for the last of us’ latest episodes in this, sorry!*

I’ve been thinking about the third episode of HBO’s The Last of Us. The final image, haunting me even now, probably forever: an open window, the sun setting, the quiet of the room against the unadulterated longing of Linda Ronstadt’s voice. Two decaying entangled bodies, husbands in their bed, that we don’t see, but we can feel—their absence is everywhere, a layer of loss above everything, suspending us in a moment of simultaneous warmth and grief. I can’t hear the song (“Long Long Time”) without crying a little bit, without at least tearing up.

I like love stories that are set in a post-apocalyptic world. I like to watch how, amidst ruin, amidst crumbling silent cities and abandoned houses and forests swallowing every last remnant of humanity, people—the handful of them left, that is—will find some way to fall in love.

The particular freedom that emerges with the post-apocalypse, or, a quality unique to its conditions, is probably what makes it such a rich territory for love stories. The old configurations of family, of love, of connection, don’t matter so much, can’t possibly matter in the same ways they once did. The heteronormative, nuclear fantasy does not govern every inch of life, is impossible in the emptied dusk that follows apocalypse; loss piles up and to be alive is to be alone unless you decide to reconfigure what family or love looks like, feels like. The easiest thing, I think, would be to stay insulated—to estrange yourself from your own capacity for anything like vulnerability or intimacy, to try and deactivate your own desire for these things in the first place. The easiest thing is to give into the silence, the abysmal solitary tone and landscape, is to calcify and harden and stay sealed into your own comfortable aloneness.

The easiest thing is to acquiesce to the ruin. And yet: these love stories persist. The desire, the reaching, for connection, for closeness, for kinship in whatever form, persists. There’s not necessarily a point to the love—it’s not necessarily a utility to be brandished and used. That pointlessness is precisely the pulse of humanity, though, isn’t it; that pointlessness is what stings in my chest, warm and bruising, keeps me so glued to the screen. The love is there. We keep reaching for it even if it’s making us more vulnerable, more susceptible to devastation, to decay. We try and try to inoculate ourselves to feeling and fail, over and over. There isn’t a point. But the love is there, anyways, insisting on following us around, making even a frayed and burnt-up life worth living, maybe.

For some reason, I’m deeply affected by The Last of Us—this TV show about fungal zombies. If you haven’t watched it, or played the game, you might not know much of what I’m talking about for most of this, so…feel free to skip this one. Or don’t. Or, watch it, because it’s gutting and immersive and, at least for me, near-perfect TV so far, which never happens. For some reason I find myself crying at some point during every episode. The thread that pulls me is, I think, the way the show depicts love: it is not necessarily glue, not necessarily life-saving, but it is life-affirming, it is life-sustaining. The forms of love that arrive are never expected or easily defined, either. Joel and Ellie’s relationship is not one borne of blood, of biological connection, not even necessarily of like (mutual irritation, really). To watch them grow to care for one another, to see this equal-parts annoying and endearing 14-year-old kid dismantle this traumatized, gruff grown man’s defenses, piece by piece, is disarming, and even beautiful.

I think of these few lines from a recent poem by the inimitable Hanif Abdurraqib:

“& so I declare on the days I want to be alive I might drag

my drummer & my singer to your doorstep & ask you to dance
yes, you, who also survived the groaning machinery of darkness
you who, despite this, do not want to be perceived in an empire
awash with light in the sinning hours & we will dance.”

This declaration, of wanting-to-be-alive, of a fierce and noisy insistence on even enjoying it, in mining some grains of light amidst the “groaning machinery of darkness” and also asking each other to keep moving towards that light—despite us not “wanting to be perceived in an empire awash with light”—it all somehow distills the strange and enveloping affect and, perhaps, argument, of The Last of Us. I think of Ellie as essentially this drummer-singer for Joel, most of the time, forcing him to wake up to the possibility of caring about something, someone, again, but also as Joel to Ellie—what can it mean to be a child in the post-apocalypse, to grow up and fuck up and try to breathe in a context of destruction, of postmortem blankness, of ruin? I think of how Joel is pushed to father Ellie, in a way, without even really meaning to or wanting to, initially, to mitigate and soften the incessant violence of their conditions. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey are so fucking good in their roles, also, and their father-child-adjacent chemistry buoys the structural despair of the show and the world they inhabit. Family is not, cannot be dependent upon blood, is always found, in a world abscessed of most normative prescriptions for how-to-live, how-to-love. This foundness is produced by immense loss but is nonetheless surprisingly imaginative, malleable in ways that might be freeing, might be fruitful.

Then, of course, there are Bill and Frank.

Their love story, at first, seems like an interruption of the “primary” plot and subjectivities—it is a series of moments that we glean from the past, as Joel and Ellie arrive at their empty house. But it is an “interruption” in the way love maybe always is, I think. Their storyline blooms from, seemingly, nowhere, but it blooms anyway, and directs us towards a constellation of sudden startling hopefulness that we didn’t necessarily expect. It isn’t a diversion. It’s an argument for the “pointless,” for the presence and resilience and stubborn thorny continuation of love, even after the sun on most of humanity has set, even after unstoppable fungal infection turns most of the population into parasitic and violent zombies.

Some viewers complained about Episode 3 for being “pointless” or “useless” to moving along the main plot. I think that a lot of these viewers probably believe adaptation, as a process, should be a very literal and inflexible adherence to/reproduction of the source material. But such an attitude, to me, fails to appreciate the most valuable and interesting, complex functions of adaptation, and that is the difference. The TV show is not so concerned with achieving particular objectives as a video game must, by nature, be. To me, the source material is the soil for something new and rich and entirely its own, whilst still paying homage or respect to the world it’s recreating. Otherwise: what is the point? Why utilize a medium if you’re not going to really, truly, utilize the medium? Fill in the absences and spaces for potential, for meaning, in the primary source? Why not linger in the palimpsest, why not let the markings grow?

Episode 3 is a queer love story that is, sure, pointless in terms of plot, on the surface. But the point is the pointlessness. The point is: even in a hellscape, even as humanity collapses and disappears, even as ghosts cling to every space and silence, love keeps re-announcing itself, keeps arriving, keeps sprouting back up to meet us, alongside the death and alongside the infection.

There’s something so keenly hopeful here that, I think, metabolizes what The Last of Us is actually about, and translates that quality into one impeccable episode, into one small love story. Queerness, in this world, is not inherently synonymous with endangerment, with shame, with the constant threat of imminent violence and erasure. Queerness just is. Queerness exists on its own terms because there’s no culture or society left to hinge shame or hurt or fear to it. Queerness is, actually, what makes life worth living, in this show, is redemptive and is as tangled and mundane and aching and incandescent as all real love is. When Bill tells Frank, “I wasn’t afraid until you showed up,” the risk, of course, isn’t queerness, but love itself, which is always a risk, always a means of self-endangerment, always a cliff’s edge whether we like or not. Even at its most stable and tender and well-maintained—like Bill and Frank’s relationship, eventually—love is a risk because, of course, people are temporary, people are always going to disappear at some point.

To permit these two men to disappear together, though, feels like a tiny glimpse of liberation, of a sort of beautiful agency that also, I think, crucially, rearranges death as not an intrinsically negative or thief-like presence, but rather, as a natural conclusion, as the recognition that life doesn’t need to be forever in order to be good.

Henry and Sam, of course, are not given such a chance. Barely anyone in the show’s universe are allowed such a peaceful exit from life. That the show offers us this one momentary gap in the constant rhythm of horror, of death after death, arbitrary and unpreventable, is what keeps me so obsessed with it. There are gaps of sunlight. There are tiny sproutings of green, of germinating fruit, of ripening strawberries, of buds of feeling and tenderness. They are minute, they are often fleeting, but they are there if you know how to look. But this is also the post-apocalypse, and there is no guarantee that anyone gets enough of those moments. The way that death happens, over and over, tragedy after tragedy, feels like the truest portrayal of what such a world would actually entail. That every character, even and especially those we come to love and empathize with, end up dead, infected, or traumatized, feels excruciating because it feels so, so true. There is a meaninglessness to it all that ruptures all the ideological, moralizing models of individualism and “goodness” so beloved by neoliberalism, by right-wing Christian bullshit; there is no logic, no way to be “good” or virtuous enough to evade the banal cruelty of the infection, I mean, because it’s not even cruelty, it’s just happening, and no one deserves it. Joel and Ellie have to, at some level, warp and maim their own humanity in order to survive—to constantly be awake to the horror around you is not exactly sustainable.

I’m not sure what I’m saying, really, about this show as a whole. Maybe nothing. This isn’t a think piece, or even altogether coherent. Rather: there is an element alive and fierce and gorgeous here that I feel the need to write through, to understand and untangle. Post-apocalyptic narratives often disappoint me as reductive, cliched, overwrought, dissolving all social conditions and effects for the sake of some still-neoliberal still-imperialist propaganda, and the constraints of genre can suffocate the potential of these stories before they even begin to find their lungs—but The Last of Us doesn’t disappoint me. I’m sure there are valid critiques to be made; I’m sure not everyone will feel so jarred and split open as I do. But maybe it’s worth thinking about how we tell stories about the post-apocalyptic, seeing as the precipice isn’t very far away, is probably a series of precipices we’re always falling over. Maybe it’s worth it to note that there can be love that springs up and cuts through ossified bone, that reaches and scratches the heart, even as the human world continues to end.