It’s been eighty-seven days. I know because I have written something every one of those eighty-seven days. Apart from the two days I was sick from eating rotten meat. Rookie mistake. But starvation and sleep deprivation will leave you dull-witted and desperate. I saw little point in recording what I thought would be my final days, but on day three, I resumed writing, making note of the lost days, as if some unknown reader would find that useful or interesting.

I have no idea who my audience is or how they will come across my writings. Some poor soul rummaging through my rucksack for something edible or useful, my corpse rotting nearby. Maybe there wouldn’t be a rotting body, just chalky bones picked clean by rodents and raccoons. Or perhaps I would be freshly killed by this hypothetical reader, in which case I hope they feel lousy about murdering me after reading these diaries. They will probably just toss them into a fire, never reading a single word.

No. There will be no readers. I am my own audience, and I write to keep from losing my mind. More. Losing my mind more. The word continues echoing through my mind, like a rat lost in a maze, trying to find a nonexistent exit.

A funny thing happens when you’re on your own for almost ninety days, you start to hear voices in your head. Mostly they are ones I recognize: my father’s disapproving voice, my sister’s soft, concerned voice, and Dustin, who has been dead for eight years. He wasn’t new. I have been speaking to him that entire time, his voice responding to my questions, remarking on my actions, judging my misdeeds. Before it happened, he was the only one. Now my head is filled with unseen others.

In the emergency room, a psychiatrist who would admit patients to the psych ward would sometimes stay and chat. He was different than the other shrinks I had encountered, who were standoffish or downright peculiar. We had a gentleman—I called all the male patients gentlemen out of respect for my fellow veterans, and to cover for the fact that I’m terrible with names. Anyway, this particular gentleman heard voices—mostly a running commentary on his daily activities, but sometimes they would be critical, and when they were mean, they sounded like his mom. It had become unbearable, so he came in.

The doc explained that most voices are harmless, only becoming a problem when they tell someone not to take their meds, to hurt themselves, or worse, to hurt others. Think of them like echoes from past conversations, returning but not new. He assured me it was normal for everyone to have an inner dialogue, or even see things, particularly before sleep. He called it “hypnagogic imagery.” I liked the way the word “hypnagogic” felt in my mouth, repeating it like a mantra before a nurse asked me who I was talking to. I knew better than to answer that question. The word echoed in my mind for the rest of the week.

After the final blackout happened, I kept reporting to work for two weeks. Staying at the apartment wasn’t an option. I hadn’t spoken to my family in at least a year, and now there was no way of reaching them. It didn’t matter, I had taken myself out of the equation, or maybe it was them who had taken themselves out of my reach. It didn’t matter anyway. Not now.

Honestly, it wasn’t the lack of electricity or refrigeration compelling me to walk two miles to the hospital every day, it was the silence. It drove me crazy. The silence had always driven me crazy. It was worse at night, hypnagogic visions of the horrors my mind refused to forget. Screams and shouts, echoing in the dark of my mind. When the power went out, I realized how much the whirring and buzzing of electricity and electronics, imperceptible until missing, kept my brain silent. Besides, there was food at the hospital, and a generator. At least at first.

The chaos of the ER was what drew me to the job in the first place. The only place outside the military where the constant wheel of self-loathing and dread stopped. Running people to the CT machine, doing chest compressions, tackling lunatics, waiting for a nurse to jab them with a syringe of painfully slow-acting tranquilizer. The place left me tired. Too tired to dream, and I never had dreams, only nightmares.

I liked the night shift best because it meant I could drink before ten a.m. with no judgement. “It’s my ten p.m.” As if drinking a fifth of vodka at ten p.m. after work was socially acceptable. I couldn’t drink now, even if I could get my hands on some liquor. There were bears in the woods, and wolves. I may be losing my mind, but I have no intention of losing my life.

Without refrigeration, the smell of decaying bodies in the morgue overwhelmed the chemical smell of the hospital. Some continued to report for duty, but not me. I was only an EMT. I considered becoming a physician assistant. I registered for classes at the community college but backed out a week before starting. Doctors stayed, dedicated to the point of obsession, but most nurses stopped showing up within days of the blackout. The ones who stayed were super fucked up. I know, I’d slept with most of them.

I walked home from the hospital, not ready to admit it was the last time. The silence that enveloped the city scared me at first, and I went anywhere it wasn’t, figuring the complete collapse of civilization would take months. I hadn’t considered that it had already collapsed before it went dark. The electricity cutting off wasn’t the catalyst; it was the result. Everything after was, arguably, the beginning of something new. A new civilization, not based on civility but brutality, and I learned that where there was noise, there were things far worse than silence. So, I sought the silence deep in the woods, north of Seattle.

I considered taking my medications, prazosin for nightmares, trazodone for sleep, and Prozac for depression. But the bottles were almost empty anyway, might as well get used to life without them starting now. Instead, I took notepads and a handful of pens. With a large military-issue rucksack, filled with what I’d need to survive in the Cascades for as long as possible, I set off in search of the silence I so despised. I only stop to sleep and take out my notepad and pen, before the last of the daylight disappears, and I write. I don’t know why, but I write. If only to keep the echoes of the voices quiet.