Life was never that different on the colony. Wasn't. Isn't. 
Fuck. I don't know. At least I don't think it was. I was never 
on Earth before the end of the world. I was born here. I'll die 
here.

It's been two years since satellite imagery first showed the third 
planet from sol abruptly become the first asteroid belt from 
sol. We still don't know how or why, though we're pretty sure 
the rest of humanity died screaming. Today the last shipments 
that'll ever arrive got here.

At the end of the Second Grade I had to be able to regurgitate 
how many light years away the earth was from the colony. For my 
High School exit exam I had to use that and enough basic 
calculus and relativity to derive how slowly the ships were 
moving, how much the crew would have aged relative to their 
family back on earth, and how many fries I'd have served to my 
successful classmate's children by the time they arrived if I 
didn't go on to college. Today I've forgotten all that shit and 
couldn't care less.

In college I let myself go into debt buying a piece of paper and 
studying more math and physics and the occasional 
mind-broadening literature elective where I could read about 
Dracula or Erzebet Bathory so that I could spend most of my days 
saying "would you like cream and sugar?" instead of "would you 
like fries with that?", but I digress. It doesn't matter. What 
matters is the following capsule summary of everything I picked 
up from my Introductory Interplanetary Economics class:

The earth needs oil. They used all theirs up. Once they realized 
this, they set out to colonize an oil rich planet 
however-many-light-years-I-could-have-told-you-in-Grade-Two 
away. 

The colony has lots of oil. It has just about everything else 
that it needs to sustain life except for one thing: iron. I 
don't know why. I'm not an astrophysicist. I'm a coffee slinger.

I do know that the colony and the earth grew into a kind of 
mutually beneficial free trade intergalactic symbiosis. We gave 
them oil. They gave us iron (mostly in the form of supplements.) 
In exchange they get the natural gas they need to be lazy 
shortsighted assholes and destroy their planet, we get the iron 
we need to have enough energy to extract that natural gas and to 
not die.

Get. Got, I guess. Two years, and I still get my tenses confused.

Today the last shipment arrived, but I've had two years to think 
and prepare, and I've spent the last one practicing.

Tonight I have a first date. It'll be just like all the other 
first dates I've been on lately. I'll wine her and dine her and 
seduce her back to my place where we'll cuddle up around a fire 
and I'll kiss her on the lips and nibble on her ear and bite her 
on the neck.

And in the morning I'll still have a shadow and cast a 
reflection in the mirror. I won't be immortal, but if everything 
works out I'll at least be the last man alive.