Literary Fiction
1 min
We Posted Through It
Matthew Simmons
The world was spinning around a giant ball of fire, and we posted through it.
Flags waved in the winds, the winds, the winds created by the turbines held aloft by enormous towers of rigid plastic and metal, towers in which men and women—but, honestly, mostly men—watched us scream and cry and fall and dream, and we posted through it.
Forests of mushrooms grew in vast warehouse spaces, once filled with goods, now filled with mushrooms, mushrooms like you've never seen, green and black and electric blue, mushrooms with heads and hands and "eyes," mushrooms that wondered things about the sky, and we posted through it.
A mother gave birth to the greatest war criminal the world would ever know, but also the world's most adorable baby, and we looked at his baby pictures and felt weird, embraced forgiveness and hated ourselves later, and we posted through it.
Manacles shackled our tiny little brains, and they were made of glimmering threads of light, and they made us never not know who we were beholden to, and we posted through it.
Facts fell apart and figures crumbled into crumbs, all while computers learned to think not in ones and zeroes, yesses and nos, but in interlocking desertscapes of maybes and maybe nots, coulda shoulda woulda computers that shrugged digital shoulders at every query, and we posted through it.
My dad died in a bed in the living room because he couldn't move and it was easier to have him in one big open space where we could all visit or not visit, and he didn't really know in which room in the house he was in to begin with, so it didn't really matter because the whole world is a bedroom when there is a bed around, and we posted through it.
Your head hurt a lot more this morning than it did last night, and that's likely because you haven't been drinking enough water, and dehydration is a serious problem, and we all were thinking about your headache, hoping eventually it would go away and you could maybe engage with us again, maybe it'll happen, maybe not, and nothing really makes sense anymore, and we posted through it.
I'm not okay, either, but lord oh lord, I'm posting through it.
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