A Report from the After Times
Normal is never coming back. We’ve got to be gentle with each other.
This is a dispatch from another planet.
For millions of people, for the rest of this mad, sad year, the world will return in pieces. Instead of remembering lasts we will start counting firsts. The first day the kids went to school. The first time you went to a bar. The first time you went to a bar and it felt normal, as if normal were a thing you could lose and get back.
Normal is never coming back. Not ever. But the aftertimes are coming. Almost everywhere, for almost everyone who has lived through the last year in Europe or South America or the United States or anywhere else where lockdowns have been loaded on top of mass death and natural disaster and civil unrest — something its ending. Which means, of course, that something else is beginning.
As people stagger out into whatever consensus reality comes next, the transition is going to be gradual. Most of us will only be able to assess the damage when we get there. Normal will grow back slow and strange, like plant life after a nuclear blast .
Except for me.
For me, the after times came all at once. I’m one of a small number of people who got to step from one reality right into the other. Two weeks ago, after a year of lockdown in one of the…
