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Back to Normal

It’s impossible to talk about the current situation, without coming back to hope. We all should come back to hope at the end of this. After suffering through countless articles and Twitter threads and Instagram videos- hearing about the loss of those closest to us, we all should be looking to end our conversations with what’s ahead: what we are going to do with the information we have.


In these moments, when you and your best friend of 25 years have fallen to the center of your informational feedback loop, accidentally sending each other articles and tweets that you shared at the top of the call, there is a fickle moment of opportunity.

“When things go back to normal…”


There it is: hope. You’re ready to hope, to daydream, to imagine the life you’ll wake up to at the end of the great sleep, how life is almost as you left it. You’ll imagine a life, much like before. That life is an illusion- it is a ghost. It looks like something you know, but it can’t connect, it has no feet on the ground, and it can be taken with the wind. We will never return to the life that was before, and if we try to, we will only be able to mimic it.


Imagine, in this slight moment of opportunity, what that will look like. Imagine the life before: the life where you walked the streets of your city, maskless. Your family was in town. Your mom offered you Purel before your hotdog, and you declined, citing how you “don’t want to help breed the supervirus.” You hugged your parents and friends, all while entirely asleep to the fact that your touches could transmit particles of extreme danger and harm, to them and others.


For better and for worse, your life was built on the assumption that you are without the power to accidentally kill someone, that those around you do not have the power to kill you, or your grandmother, or your best friend, without you having some way to stop it.

This is gone. We are never going back to the previous bliss, to pure apathy towards contagions and contamination.


The truth- what you are realizing- is that you did not need to be doing that job from your desk on the 8th floor. You did not need to have brunch with your friends outside on that beautiful, rare 60 degree day in March. We didn’t need any of it, but we did it, because that’s how we exercised the power of control over our lives. We, the hyper-civilized, hyper-advanced species that diverts rivers and shoots rockets into space before safely returning them to earth for a refuel and another flight, have subverted, tricked, and outsmarted the world around us to a point of such extreme comfort for ourselves that the line between necessary and not went out the window. When your species has dominated the entire planet to where all that’s left to explore is either on another planet or at the bottom of the ocean, you may very well wake up to how you’ve used that power to go to brunch, or to work at a company that’s part of a system you say you don’t agree with. We all should stop to enjoy a nice day or some eggs Benedict, but only as a break from our work. And when a pandemic puts the world economy at risk, and you’ve lost your job for god knows how long, and you are on a seemingly permanent break from seemingly everything, you see things differently than you’ve ever seen them before.


You may begin to realize that brunch was not a break. It was an Uber and Instagram and eggs Benedict. Your fat joint and pizza and Call of Duty was not a break. It was Seamless, Snapchat, and Samsung. You were not on the clock, but you were consuming, which is not an inherently bad thing, but you were doing it while completely unaware of the cost that it took to get there. You were asleep to the innumerable and interconnected systems of humans that spun the web you slept on, just to bring you to that moment. Nevermind the next or the previous one. The expansive networks of natural and artificial systems that brought you to a bite of english muffin with poached egg and hollandaise while your friend laughed in the background.


Now we wake to the systems. They are there, they are alive, and we control them. Now we know. How then, being rudely and painfully dragged from our tents and into the blistering sun, will we look at ourselves? We are melting, we are moulting, we are revealing our deepest structures and seeing them at the same time. How then, in the brightest light, could we go back?

It was a machine of our own making. Our jobs, our routines, our bad habits our good ones- all of our own making. Perpetuated by us, and in the face of mass death, stopped, or paused as we choose to view it.

When the virus is tamed, we will live each day with the knowledge that all of this can be taken away from us in with breeze. We were working to sell widgets, maybe we still are, but we can never return to sleep, and close our eyes to the fragility of all we know.


How then, could we go back? We cannot. The images, the memories, the feelings we have that remind us of the place we came from will always be there, but only in our minds. What lives outside of our memory is only what we create from this moment forward. In that fickle moment of opportunity, when you say or you hear “When things go back to normal,” Stop. You are awake. The world is exposed. Do not go back.


Do not reinvent, do not recreate the world we had before, because the world we had before was built on the dream we’ve now woken from. What this means is that every memory, still fresh in our minds as we live the same day over and over again now, is the sweetest honeytrap we can know. The desire to go back, to close the wound and let our society heal, is built on the idea that the body outsizes the gash. But the cut is too deep, we’ve lost too much blood, and we are hallucinating only what our brain has the oxygen to imagine: a memory, overlaid with endorphins, pumping at light speed to color it all with euphoria. It glimmers in the center of your brain, hogging all your processing power, but it cannot be recovered because the sun it out, and we all can see the truth. Forego what you know, because out here, on the frontier of evolution, the cutting edge that divides species’, we are all witnessing the disintegration of all that came together to create our “lives.” The spell is broken, and to mimic, to attempt to return to life as it was before will only leave you staring at an empty shell of the life you once knew, hollowed to reveal how much was filled with ignorance of all that we were standing on, how high our tight rope was stretched above the distant ground. We cannot go back, because we have looked down. And when you look down, and see how high you are, you are already falling.


If we mimic the life we had before, if we try to go back, to return, it will only be empty. It will be a crude theatrical presentation of the memory, but with no endorphins to smooth the facade. The actors won’t know their lines and the cues will be all messed up, because we are scriptless, and the dance has no melody.


Only from here, in the fall, may we remember that “sorry” was once an apology, and “how are you?” a question.


The script is gone, the sun’s come out, we have looked down, and there is no net. Only forward.

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