The sound of thunder shakes my walls at night. The window is open. The melancholy moan of the air raid siren sounds so loud it hurts my head. The chaotic cacophony of glide-bombs detonating in methodical rhythm all over Kharkiv tap-tap-tap away at my consciousness as I try to sleep. Sometimes they’re close, and the world trembles. Other times they’re like a distant dream. It’s around midnight. The heat of record high temperatures still clings to the humid air.
Welcome to the intersection of world-altering events: climate change and war, wildfires and famine, droughts and displacement, artificial intelligence and unemployment.
And somewhere in America, Donald Trump gets convicted.
It’s an apotheosis of apathy, entropy, and denial. Everyone’s just going through the motions of the old-world, waiting for their feet to fall out from under them. No one is ready to believe in the future. No one is ready to let go of the past. Yet, this is not the future, nor the past, but the present. Yesterday’s science-fiction is today’s reality. Cognitive dissonance dissociates from the years gone by, living in a false eternal present without a future or a past. Everyone’s just reaching out desperately for comfortable and familiar things, grabbing hold of them like a security blanket.
Nostalgia is a disease.
Looking up at my ceiling, I feel anxious. I feel the weight of my failures press harder against my chest than any bomb or bullet could ever strike me. Every time I failed to return a call. Every promise that was lost to time. Every person I failed to live up to. Every dream I let die. Every love I lost. These are the things that trouble me, not death, not the end of the world, not injustice, not violence, not fear, but shame.
Shame because I could always do better but never do.
But then, from the dark abyss that has emptied inside me, I smile. I breathe and feel the light of a thousand suns. I thank God and the universe and all the people and spirits of the world, wordlessly, with a single thought of such unified power that it acknowledges and rejoices in all existence equally, every moment of suffering and sadness, joy and jubilation, all things being equally loved. Gratitude is the secret guardian of our hearts against soul sickness. I think of all the things I’ve been allowed to do. The places I’ve been. The people I talked to. The friends I made. The legends I got to hear speak. The love the world has for me. The love I have for the world.
No amount of pain or death can take that from me.
The air raid siren stops, and I drift off to sleep.
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