when radiation came to play

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The catastrophic disaster at Chernobyl in 1986 was my first introduction to the idea that the world isn't a warm and cosy place, but instead a planet filled with impending doom and destruction. My world stopped being a safe haven full of fluffy bunnies and kiss chase, and became somewhere terrible, something I would need to survive. I was young, not yet a teenager, and the news about the incident became the saddest thing I had ever heard. {I had studied the Titanic and Scott of the Antarctic at primary school and they just stopped being sad enough.} Even now, knowing that only {allegedly} employees at the reactor lost their lives, I still feel great sadness when I see photographs of what was left behind. When I look back I view that day as one of the defining moments in my life. I woke up a child with innocent dreams, and went to bed an almost-adult, having to deal with man-made chaos. From that point on I became voraciously involved in immersing myself in all things horror, mostly in the form of books. My bedtime reading went from Sweet Valley High to anything by Stephen King and James Herbert. I would borrow books from the library about all sorts of ghoulishly supernaturally stuff. My favourite book for a very long time was King's The Stand which became my instruction manual for how to survive in the event of the apocalypse, in whatever form it may take. My imagination was rampant. I knew - without a doubt - that I would be one of the survivors when the world ends. I wrote weird wordage, trying to put together sentences about the dead swinging from lampposts, writing stories that nobody would ever read. I think that mostly I realised that there are always consequences. The world may be perfect and beautiful, wondrous and mystifying, but it's also secretive and hurtful, cruel and unapologetic. It takes just as easily as it gives, and it always gets what it desires. I've always harboured dreams of travelling to Chernobyl. There's something evocative about meandering through a deserted and decaying radioactive town, hearing the echoes of long-lost laughter and seeing the ghosts of families who had to leave in a hurry. It could have been so much worse.