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strange and disquieting quality to her silence,
They treated her like she could shatter at any moment.
It was clear her understanding of reality had dawned, but it was still incomplete.
The inevitable, clanging acceptance was still due.
We were monsters once, and although we are not anymore, we know we remain unforgiven to everyone who isn’t in the group.
We’re hungry for fresh listeners, because the more you tell your own story, the more it makes sense to you,
After a month of living with the ghost of her,
the truth of her words passing like the shadow of a storm cloud.
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.
Logic might tell you it would be safer not to have a television at all in a room full of people who fell for the bullshit of the narrative the first time. My own suspicion is the television is not there for our own entertainment; it’s another tool Ironside uses to test the cure.
a blossom of that smell again slipping through the clouds of lemon detergent.
As soon as she told me what I was supposed to be hearing, I heard it.
Neither of us knew it at the time but she’d been subconsciously laying groundwork to overthrow reality.
drawn to the spectacle with a greedy sort of horror.
But by punctuating one sentence so decisively, she had only made room for another one.
it’s easier to think of the infected, the uninfected, and the cured, but there’s always been a bit more to it than that.
There’s a fancy name for it, one of those long Latin ones that sounds like poetry, but I can never remember.
It drip-fed us confirmation bias. It took the lie and weaponised it.
constructed over the long haul by misunderstandings, groupthink, pop-culture, and paranoia.
They never saw dead people; they never saw the world ending.
so bright and vivid and hungry as Macey and I walked away from the burning restaurant—
the most secure walls keeping us in are those built by the knowledge that none of us has anywhere better to go.
My time inside had allowed me to develop a different sort of agoraphobia.
They were living people. They had a story of their own.
They’re charismatic, confident. They’re the carriers of the lie, and the gleam burns so bright in them it draws the rest of us, reigniting the light in our own eyes until we see nothing other than the perspective they shape for us. The believers are the ones who can explain what’s happening. They justify it and we simply shovel down all the shit we were fed as though it’s good for us.
“It’s a cop-out,” she said. “All that carefully constructed world building, all those people who you believe in and then . . . nah, it’s a lie and none of it really matters. No one wants that. We read stories, watch shows on TV, and we appreciate they’re fiction. But when they come out and outright admit it, it pisses us off.”
It was, in effect, the outlines of someone else’s story, written in an abstract that didn’t quite connect with me anymore.
Or maybe we’re each trapped in our own narratives and blind to the experience of everyone else?
