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When I say this is a love story, I mean this is a story about someone who believed in something impossible and beautiful and dangerous with such strength of character and devotion that they followed the thread of it all the way to the very end, no matter what the world threw at them.
Night means darkness, darkness means introspection, introspection dredges up all kinds of monsters and my god, do those bastards keep us busy until dawn.
The thing about new people in the group was that it was another opportunity for the rest of us to tell our own stories again. We’re hungry for fresh listeners, because the more you tell your own story, the more it makes sense to you, and as Awad delights in pointing out, the more the cure works.
Isn’t it beautiful how stories can work like that? The subtle way they help the teller, the subversive way they reach the listener, how they creep inside you like waking dreams.
Macey once told me the problem with the truth was that it was so poorly written. Given the choice, the pleasantly told lie is always more seductive. That’s why religion is so potent, she said. Why history and science are still considered up for debate. Myth is more appealing than verified truth because the grey areas between the facts can still be used against us.
Funny, isn’t it? You tell yourself that when the world ends, all of that nonsense will dry up. It’ll be like a purge of the banal, and all the trivia of the world will be the first down the plughole. But no, the same old shit floats to the top without needing us to be there to witness it. Yesterday, the highlight of my day was seeing a group of junior chefs competing to see who could make the best cheeseburger; this morning there was a silent music video from a singer-songwriter with a furrowed brow.
When the narrative has taken hold, it brings with it a constricting of focus; a tendency to only see what is perceived to be true at the expense of everything else.
They liked the weapons she had forged herself; they couldn’t stand the way she chose to wield them.
“People’s reactions to them are the most interesting of all.”
The crazy stuff was already sneaking in by then. Little cracks in the societal structure everyone stepped over with a little skip rather than stopping to figure out how to resolve.
Remember the clip of two men in Times Square? That was a few weeks later. Two businessmen in suits, standing on a corner, surrounded by cut-price superheroes and bright neon signage. The quality wasn’t very good, but it was good enough for a debate. Some people said the men were kissing, some insisted one was biting the neck of the other. He was eating him, they said. Eating him! And for every person who said it was one thing, there was someone else who’d say the opposite. You could watch it side by side with a friend and you’d each see something different. It was the new gold/blue dress
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She nearly spat. “I’m not working in a bookshop,” she said. “Every asshole in my class wants to work in a bookshop. ‘It would be my dream job! I write books, I sell books.’ Please. People who work in bookshops are the worst. They’re . . . I dunno, capitalist librarians.”
When the dominant narrative started to snowball, the infection short-circuited our reason. It drip-fed us confirmation bias. It took the lie and weaponised it.
A certain sort of vulnerability to look at someone, a group of people and think: monster, zombie, Other.
He was building a world blind to the parts that still existed, and I suppose there was a historical precedence to that.
History is one long string of stories honed to sharpen one side over another.
“I miss being infected. I miss the narrative.” Her smile was small, her eyes raw. “Not because of Val, never because of him. No, I miss the certainty of it. It made the world so . . . simple. It was us and them and that was that. The whole world was black and white. Everything was easy. And most important of all, I loved my son with such a ferocity it lit a fire within me and that fire fuelled me in the way nothing else could.
