Your Point?

Since when can you smell water?

Yeah, you drink it, but even then it is practically tasteless. All we know is that it’s healthy and one of the main things that keep us alive. So we drink it. But it’s not because we like it.

The thing is, we tend to not appreciate things when we have them. Which can be seen when the father finds “a cistern filled with water so sweet that he could smell it.” Maybe the absence of something makes you notice it all the more, noting the aspects you barely knew existed once upon a time.

Water is a symbol for life. But we have yet to figure out that ‘life is a gift and not a given right’ (Nickelback). We live as if it is written in stone and the world is lucky to have us claiming our territory. Which in reality is a misconception, considering our presence means agony for this Earth and we're the ingredients for its future demise.

We don’t notice the sweetness and the pure bliss of living until we end up in a world where the only humans who exist are trying to eat our flesh and instead of pink sunsets you see a constant grey. This is the dad appreciating what before he wouldn’t have given a second thought. Life in all its non-post-apocalypses glory.

It’s times like these, when their suffering is described and the hunger is all but screaming, and the cannibals are oh-so-very near, that I wonder how this book is going to end. I could totally flip the pages until the very last one and fulfill my curiosity. But who even does that? I never have, and never will, ruin the anticipation and the pure essence of reading a book, by ruining the end. That's just blasphemy. But I still want to know. I want to understand the meaning of this novel and whether father and son are going to, after this huge struggle, die (which would lead to me pounding my head repeatedly against a very, very, hard, solid object). Or if the world is somehow going to magically surge into a replica of the dream it was before. Because the ending will be what truly gives this novel a purpose.

Or else its just a pile of ash and depressing words and pitiful moments that drown in negativity.

And pointless.