I contemplate this in the sandbox, decorating cakes.
Hard to imagine what it might look like. The first floats vaguely in the mind. The second more clearly, of course. I've been to the museum. Read those books, always imagining it was quite a long time before when really, grandma was 16 years old when it started.
(How many of us can name all eight great-grandparents, let alone name a single thing about them?)
So this is what it feels like.
I remember hearing how even in the second, it wasn't as clear-cut as you might assume with the privilege of hindsight. There may have been people, even in your own family, that thought what would now seem unthinkable things.
A breeze catches my face in its hands and I think this must be one of the things the astronauts miss. What must it be like to see it all from a distance, small and vulnerable and precious and almost nothing?
Will it start on a day? Is it happening already? It is Tuesday and it is hard to know. What will Tuesdays be like when words are weaponized but also hollowed of all meaning? When faith begins to more boldly conflate virtue with violence? The pen has dropped and no one knows who will write the next chapter.
Small bird on a bare branch. I wonder if, months from now, I will be able to look at even a small bird with such polite wonder. Will everything change?
I imagine this time the fear will be more to do with numbers. Energy. No, not crystals. A more literal power. So how do you really prepare to live with the lights off? How do you get ready to do without that tie that web that net that grid that unavoidable convenience that at some point began to bind us all?
Sign out. Look around. Write it down.