We are still mourning.
The pandemic began six years ago and it’s still on the tip of our tongues. It’s implied in conversations, when not explicitly invoked. The before. The after. The what could have been.
Everyone is currently living two lives. The one they’re living, and the one they had expected to live six years ago. Six years. It’s who we knew we would be based on a reality that never materialized. We’re a record, stuck in the rut, the needle skipping back and forth in the worn groove of friendships out of alignment, relationships that ended, jobs that no longer exist, places we no longer live, but only in this timeline.
Everyone is currently living two lives.
We are still mourning. AI came for their skills and we were amused. It made us all into characters from a famous indie studio or retail packaged toys and we loved it. And now it has come for our skills. Skills we spent our lifetimes acquiring, marketing, selling our time for. And those skills are now their’s. And we use their tools and we are… productive. If nothing else, we are productive. We are so productive because they are productive for us. But we mourn the craft that we thought we had built and the fulfilling work we did to build it.
We are stilling mourning. The government came for their lives. We did not know what to do. It’s not our business. We might have gotten it wrong. Authority is often the shape of correct, if not actually right. Maybe we won’t be noticed. The others will disappear, but we will blend in. We will survive by behaving. By avoiding the wrong topics of conversation. By performing well at our jobs, if we have them. And yet we will miss our neighbors. And then we will be noticed. And others will miss us.
We are still mourning.