The Snark | The Purge (The Part No One Talks About)

Not the Death. The Moment Just Before.

We talk a lot about dying. We write it, film it, podcast it, metaphysic the hell out of it. But The Purge isn’t death. It’s the moment just before – the final seconds when the world begins to fall away. Not explode, not collapse. Just… slip. Like you’re loosening your grip on the thread that tied you to the noise and the light and the nonsense of living.

You don’t scream. You don’t fight. There’s no speech. Just the slow, awful recognition that your last connection to the world is unspooling, thread by thread, and you’re not holding the scissors.

Everything Goes. That’s the Horror

Not just your body. Everything. The walls around you stop meaning “home.” The sky outside is no longer “today.” The face beside you – beloved, familiar – becomes suddenly distant, like a photograph from a life you barely remember. Even the bed you lie in becomes strange. You’re in it, but not of it.

You’re letting go of nouns. That’s what no one tells you. The nouns go first. “My hand.” “My daughter.” “My breath.” Gone, gone, gone.

There is no music. Only the mute thud of absence.

It’s a Terrible Kind of Peace

No, it’s not violent. It’s quieter than that. More like snow falling over the tracks of a life you walked for decades. A slow hush. The kind of silence that knows it can’t be reversed. You don’t fear it – there’s no time. But you feel it. The loss of everything, all at once, in sequence. An inventory of love, grief, memory, pain – erased in reverse.

Even your own name gets quieter. Until it’s just something someone else might remember, once you’re no longer here to answer.

Why Writers Need to Get This Right

We’re not asking for tragedy porn. But we are asking for truth. Because the part that matters – the part readers carry with them – isn’t the dramatic final breath. It’s the stillness before it. That moment when your character realizes they’re not in the world anymore, not really. They’re beside it. Watching it slip from them like smoke from a dying fire.

Write that. Write the falling-away. The nouns, the rooms, the sounds, the sky. The un-belonging. Let it be quiet. Let it be simple. Let it be devastating.

Closing Note from The Snark

If death is the last note in a symphony, The Purge is the silence after the music stops – but before the applause, before the lights come up, before anyone breathes. It’s not drama. It’s absence.

And trust me, reader, it’s coming for us all. Not with fireworks. With stillness. With the sound of your favorite things slipping out the side door. Not stolen. Just… no longer yours.

So maybe write something honest about it. And then go outside and look at the sky like it still belongs to you. While it does.

The Snark