After the Storm, We Forgot

The sky turned black. The streets burned. Hospitals overflowed. Sirens replaced songbirds. And then— Silence. Scrolling. Business as usual. We called it survival. But it was erasure. We lived through fires that scorched the very air we breathed. Floods that swallowed homes whole. Riots that tore cities open like old wounds. A virus that stopped the world in its tracks. But ask the average person now—and they’ll shrug. “It wasn’t that bad.” “We got through it.” “Let’s not dwell.” Dwell? We didn’t dwell . We buried. We paved over trauma with productivity. We replaced mourning with memes. We traded our memories for distractions. The past decade wasn’t a movie. It was blood on the streets , bodies in freezer trucks , tears behind locked doors , and rage muffled by masks. But we were told to move on. Rebuild. Forget. So we did. We forgot how fragile the system was. How quickly it fell. How easily truth was manipulated, twisted, or deleted. We forgot who ...