20 years. I've been the only living soul on this floating rock for 20 years. 20 years ago, I had a wife. I had kids. Sure, I wasn't the smartest person in the world, but I was doing just fine. Now I am the smartest person in the world, but it's hardly a competition.

My previous life wasn't filled with grandeur by any means. I had a boring desk job at a dying company working under an idiotic CEO, but after my recent life experience, I'd give anything to go back.

Being the only person alive gets incredibly boring after a while. I don't know how I've made it this long, to be entirely honest. I get by on all the food I can find, but I try to ration myself in case this whole thing lasts for longer than I'd like.

Why me? That's the only thought that has been running through my head for these last 20 years. Surely there must be a reason, right? I must have been chosen for some specific reason. Or was I just the only person deemed not worthy of freezing in place? How does that even happen? I go to sleep one night a little earlier than usual and when I wake up, the entire human population is just...frozen.

Finding my wife frozen in the middle of brushing her teeth was unbearable. I didn't know what was going on, or why. I called my best friend, but I was just sent straight to his voice mail. "Hi, you reached Bob! Go ahead and leave a message after the beep!"

That's when I got the idea to start calling people and have their voicemails keep me company. Most days it's my wife. "Hi, this is Cindy! I'm not able to answer your call right now, but please leave a message and I'll get back to you as soon as I can!" Just hearing her voice makes my stomach twist in ways I previously didn't think possible. I really miss her.

Eventually, I started calling every single possible number in existence. The first time I heard someone respond to my call was 10 years ago. I dialed up the number and heard a voice on the other line. "Hello?"

I jumped up from my chair. "Hello? Hello?? Is someone there? Can you hear me-"

"I'm just kidding! This is my voicemail, silly! You know what to do at the beep!"

The second time was five minutes ago.

I put in a random number, like I always do. I hit call and listened to the ring. A voice came through the phone. "Hello?"

Oh great. Another one of these. My finger moved to hang up.

"Hello?" The voicemail said again. I was hovering above the red button. "Oh my God hello?!"

What.

I stared at my phone. The voicemail cried out again. "Hello? Is someone there? Please please please let there be someone there!" This wasn't a voicemail at all. This was a person. A real, actual person!

"Hello?" I said into my phone.

"Oh my God!!" The voice on the other side sounded excited to hear another person after so long. So was I.

"Who is this?" I asked.

"This is incredible!" The other person responded, ignoring my question. They had some kind of European accent and also sounded feminine and around the same age as me. Not that that's easily guessable by voice, but what else can I go off of right now?

"Who is this?" I repeated, more assertive this time.

"Oh of course! Where are my manners? My name is Rachel Brown. Wow. Haven't said that to anyone in a long time. May I ask who this is?"

I didn't respond. I didn't trust what I was hearing right now. 20 years with no one to talk to and now all of a sudden someone's just here? It seems too good to be true.

"Hello? Have you hung up? Please tell me you're still there!"

This time I did respond. Suspicious or not, this was a chance to at least talk to someone real. "Hi. Sorry. I was just taken aback a bit by the fact that I'm talking to an actual person. My name is Zeke Allen."

"I can't believe this is real right now!" Rachel squealed over the phone.

"Yeah, me neither." I responded with a more cautious tone.

Rachel then asked me about my life experiences and what I've been doing during The Freeze as she called it. Despite my skepticism of this whole situation, I told her my entire life story. After I was done, I asked her about herself and she talked for hours. She talked about being an only child with divorced parents and about her struggle with addiction in her teenage years. She then explained how she was only 25 when the world froze around her and how she hadn't had time to settle down the way I had. Apparently in her 20 years of this hellscape, she had been exploring the world, visiting all the places she never could all over the Eurasian continent. Between the two people left on Earth, only one of us has visited North Korea. Listening to her talk about all the incredible sights she'd seen made me realize that I never really moved around all that much other than to get more food when I had drained the nearby area. I mean the entire world has been frozen in time for 20 years and I never even thought to go to Canada or even the beach!

"...and then I got this phone call and now I've been talking to you for the last 5 hours. Man, it feels wonderful to be able to say all of this to someone."

"I know what you mean." I nodded in agreement, even though she couldn't see that.

I heard a snap from the other end of the call. "I have a wonderful idea!" Rachel exclaimed. "What if we meet up? That way we can at least have someone in this barren world."

I was still unsure about the whole situation, but I have to admit that seeing another person not frozen in place did sound like a wonderful idea. "That sounds great. One huge problem though. We live on separate continents and neither of us are pilots or sailors."

"How is that a problem?" Rachel asked with genuine confusion in her voice.

"Uhhh...I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but there's this giant thing called the ocean separating the two of us."

"Zeke. Everything is frozen in place. The ocean is included in that. You can literally walk on water."

Of course! Why didn't I think of that?

I agreed to walk across the ocean and meet Rachel in Portugal since I was currently in Virginia and Rachel was currently in eastern Kazakhstan. It was just about halfway for both of us. We agreed on meeting up the Sea You Surf Café and then we hung up and both started our treks. I got in my car and started driving.

I reached the coast in about an hour. I drove my car along the road and then took it onto the beach. Rachel was right. The ocean was entirely frozen in place. I don't know why that surprised me so much, but for some reason it did. It made me think that maybe...

Slowly, I inched my car closer to the ocean until I was right at the edge. With a deep breath, I started moving forward. My car reached the ocean and cut right through the water without creating so much as a ripple. No luck. Sighing, I got out of my car and grabbed a backpack of supplies out of the trunk.

Hoisting the bag onto my back, I took a deep breath and stood at the line between water and sand. The world must have frozen during low tide considering how far I was from the boardwalk. Before blindly trusting the water, I decided to take a test step. Carefully, I lowered my foot onto the surface of the salty blue. To my absolute surprise, the water held my weight. I was doing it. I was walking on water. I begun to run around like an absolute fool, but it didn't matter to me what I looked like. No one could see me anyway.

Then I calmed down and stopped running. With the biggest smile on my face, an upbeat attitude for the first time in a long time, and that undeniable feeling that something just didn't feel right, I turned to get one last good look at the only land I'd see for the next few days.

Then I faced the ocean. I thought of everything I was leaving behind here. Cindy. My kids. Everything I had ever known. But then a new thought came to my head. A potential future with the only other person left unfrozen on the planet. And maybe some day time will unfreeze itself again or maybe Rachel and I will be able to find a way to do so. Either way, I knew I was ready to start trying something.

With one final deep breath, I started walking.