Phantom pain
The world will never go back to being the way it was, they say.
From my cosy stronghold, a house consisting of a garden that’s erupting with more beauty every day, a pantry that doesn’t empty, a family I love and relatives both near and abroad doing fine, it’s hard for me to really imagine this. Or, put more plainly: I can’t.
These are Schrödinger days — days in which everything seems possible yet none of it is anymore.
There are days in which the future is dawning with the heartwarming hope of a move towards sustainability, yet every escape from the neoliberal virus that is bringing down the planet seems to have become an illusion.
There are days when I consider myself the luckiest person alive. There are days I am staring at the walls in despair.
There are days I catch myself longing for the world to return to ‘normal’. But then again, I don’t want it to. For ‘normal’ was an ecological and humanitarian disaster, a dream of blind, power-hungry economic supremacy, starring human kind as a virus rampant on a besieged, feverish planet.
There are days I am deeply concerned about the decisions the Powers That Be will be making for this world, right over all of our heads. I am afraid everything will go back to the way it was. I am afraid nothing will go back to the way it was ever again.
My whole life is itching and raw.
I believe I am suffering from phantom pain. Only, I’m not sure yet whether the itching limb has truly been amputated, or has only temporarily been put out of order.
I don’t even know which of both scenarios I would prefer to be true.
I can see the world remain as it always was.
I cab see the world chance irrevocably, and all our lives along with it.
Fortunately, nature brings council, as it always does. In what is past, invariably the grains of a new beginning reside.
And in the mean time, for want of better, I am cherishing my phantom pain as a vital kind of memory.
