My husband is sleeping peacefully beside me. Down the hall, the children doze, too — no stomachaches or nightmares tonight. But I cannot sleep. I’m staring at the ceiling, head full of screeching zombies and blown-out cities.
“The Last of Us,” the HBO series about a fungus that turns people into zombies, based on a video game, returned for its second season last month. I have been unwell since. Each episode has left me sleeping badly and haunted while awake, dreading the next Sunday, when I’ll have to sit down in front of my TV and do it all again. I spent the 57 unbearable minutes of Season 2, Episode 2, gripping, alternately, my husband and the giant cushion that more typically forms the back of our couch, occasionally screaming variations on “Dear God,” “No” and “Ugh.”
I know that in the two years since I survived Season 1, there must have been many months when I lived a normal life, not contemplating zombies at all, much less the apocalyptic potential of mushrooms. And yet now that the show is back, I cannot fathom how exactly that worked. If you see me this spring — cheering enthusiastically at my son’s baseball game, making small talk at the potluck barbecue — know that inside, I am barely holding it together.
“Why don’t you just stop watching?” you ask. So do my friends, my family, the waitress who had the unfortunate responsibility of explaining a mushroom dish to me recently. It’s a great question and one I’ve asked myself daily since mid-April. Why am I, a 40-year-old woman whose other hobbies include analyzing Taylor Swift lyrics and shopping for athleisure, so obsessed with a show that is clearly torturing me?
I’ve come to the unfortunate realization that the torture might be the point. There’s no better distraction from whatever currently ails you than, well, something worse. I could use some distraction these days.
When I’m thinking about the zombie apocalypse, I am not thinking about the kind-of-sort-of-possibly apocalyptic things that are really taking place in 2025. My brain just can’t do both things at once. So while I salute all of you out there doing the hard work to make change in our actual world, I guess I choose the zombies.
