Tag: Bad News

I wouldn’t have thought that it would be her who would be the first to suffer. Of everyone whose name and face I had in my brain, I would have been less surprised at anyone. We all felt the illness, its imprint against our movements, its pressure resting on the threads of our lives stretched taught. We can feel its intangible eerie presence, hanging just where we can’t quite see it. We understand that it’s serious. There’s no longer a shrug in a casual meeting, since deemed illegal. There’s no more bluntly decapitating shock in the office kitchen as civilian employees tell of hushed word from friends in medicine. It’s a shame the swimming pools will have to close, but at least we’ll have somewhere large and tiled to store the surging, system-crippling influx of dead bodies. There’s no one left in the office kitchen to realise just how real this is. 

But largely, the majority of us are not suffering. It is inconvenience and it is detriment, but not loss. Not beyond a plane ticket or a birthday party. You retain your shelter, your breath, your loved, and your life. The radiation level misfortune most of us are handed is either a product of the faceless population’s suffering, or its attempted prevention. We know it sucks, but it also frequently sucks to be alive, and yet most of us want to continue living. No one wants to die from a news story. Your life is the last thing that the world can rip from you, and yes, if perhaps not the absolute worst then it’s definitely the loss that harbors the most raw terror. There are other things here to lose at the feet of this new chaos. If your adult life is a long game of chess, then right now you’re playing on a fold-up table in the back of a fishing boat. Not realising quite how far out you’re drifting, or just how dark the swelling water has grown. As the wind squares up to spit and pummel, most of us will be lucky to keep all the pieces in the boat, let alone on the board. A few will have enough spared to maintain their strategy, a few will have so little material left unspilled that they’ll be forced to dive overboard after their pawns. Like any distribution, this storm will leave most of us somewhere in between. But even that can mean a person losing all of their defenses.