So what shall I do for my first post to my game design talk blog? How about something completely unrelated to games?
Real talk, I have like 10 articles in drafts but find it hard to just go and finish any of them since I was thinking “well I need something really good for the first article!”. I have since realized that that is very stupid and I am very stupid and I do whatever I want.

Someone gave me advice today on a good way to avoid constantly wanting to start 50 different projects and activities and getting too distracted/overwhelmed by all of them to do anything. (Something I do almost as often as I write extremely long sentences with no commas). The advice was to have a theme each month, and to focus my personal projects/activities on that theme. Since it is almost May, I’ve decided to try it out by making this STORY MONTH (cue sparkles and fireworks).
I’ll be posting some short stories over the course of the month, starting now with two tiny stories I wrote semi-recently, both with a similar theme. Enjoy!

STORY 1: Earth
I miss Earth. Not the wasteyard I left behind. I miss when I could call it home without weeping.
I miss when the sky was blue, when the forests were alive.
I miss the sun, the moon, the stars I always knew.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was ours, it was the only thing that truly belonged to us.
I miss when we didn’t know what we had.

I miss my friends, the mountains and the sea.
I miss my friends, the places I knew, the ambience of being where I was me, I miss all those stupid worthless things that made me feel I belonged on my two feet.

I miss being able to forget Earth.
I miss being able to still leave Earth behind.
I miss the view when I last saw it, through the window of my escape, when I thought I’d someday return but felt it was goodbye.

I miss being alive.
Earth was our beating heart. When it died, we left with it.

STORY 2: Paradise
“Come with me, hold my hand, to a land where no worries are found
Follow me, walk my steps, until we reach that distant place
Once we arrive, oh how we will delight
The sunshine will blind us from our pasts
The raindrops will wash away our worries
Nothing will ever be wrong again,
Least of all, us.”

The inscription had not faded in spite of its age, but it had become harder to read. Graffiti covered part of it, the word “sunshine” particularly was difficult to see filter through the bright red paint. Other parts were scratched, in ways that were unlikely to be accidental, if the bright-red words “Fuck you bastards” did not get the message across.
They were all gone now anyways. All their childish screaming, their violent tantrums, their kicking and throwing brought them nothing. It was just Uriel left, keeping the memories of their naive hopes and inevitable despair on her shoulders.

The light of the flashlight flickered. The battery was low. All the lights aboard the ship had gone out by now, save for this. Soon, the last one would be extinguished. And then another.
Uriel knew her lifespan was counted, and not in years nor months nor days. It was a cruelty, having to await your death alone, having the cursed gift of time. It allowed her, forcefully, to recollect. To remember. To process, yet she knew she would never reach the stage of acceptance before the life support system took its final breath.

She turned off the light.

Void swallowed the ship whole at last.

Behind her was a window, showing the glory of the cosmos. The small dots of light from distant stars only served to highlight the vast, vast nothing between them. She did not look.
It would be a mockery, to die facing the evidence of their foolishness, of their great mistake, the empty space where their new home was meant to be.

Did the scientists make a mistake, under the stress and duress of the end of the world?Was this always meant to simply be a temporary hope, a small final hope for humanity?Was there ever really a habitable exoplanet here, or had it vanished, had it played a trick on them by closing the door just as they finally managed to crawl to it?

It hardly mattered at this point, but pondering this mystery was a good enough pastime for Uriel. The weight of the sacrifice of Earth was not fully felt by her, anyways. She never saw it. She was born on the ship, part of the 7th generation. The final generation. The one that would finally step foot on dirt, breathe natural air, feel the sunshine and the raindrops and all those other wonderfully irritating things that the stories in the library told.
The first citizens of the new Earth became settlers of the void.

The life support system of the Postremus expired an hour after Uriel turnt off her flashlight.
Uriel died one minute and three seconds after she turnt off her flashlight. 
Humanity died the moment the Postremus left their home.