January 7th

 1


Nothing happens immediately. Everything takes time. But 8 days? Eight days to the end of everything? Eight days before I started to see bodies torn apart and the world end? That fast?

No. Obviously not. None of that happened in Eight days. It was eight days of tweets, sure. But it was eighty years, eighty decades, eighty centuries of pent up worry and anger and hatred that led to it. Nothing happens immediately.


2


The sixth had been scary. I get that it doesn’t sound scary now. Now that I wrote it down I know that it might seem like i am placing too much emphasis on it. But..

But it wasn’t just a person at my door or a group of people on the street. It was that I knew, deep down, that it was the beginning. The beginning of what, I didn’t know at the time. I just knew it was the beginning. 

Jan 6th 2021 was scary because we all saw on TV people attacking the capitol. It doesn’t escape my notice that Jan 6th 2022 was the day it went viral.


3

On the 7th, I opened my windows and looked out. Nobody was on the street. I turned to my computer and felt no urge to log on, no urge to look at my phone. But I knew that behind the closed doors of those other houses people were logging on and were reading twitter and facebook and whatever. 

My television turned on. I hadn’t hit the power button. I turned to it and looked and there was a man's face on it. He was smiling. 

“Just read your twitter feed”. It didn’t come from the speakers on the TV, it came from inside my mind. It sounds almost like my own voice. Like it was almost my idea. I started moving to my phone and stopped.

The face on the TV looked a bit less welcoming in it’s smile now. It looked like it was on the verge of anger. I let my hand reach out and grasp my phone as if I were going to turn it on… and then slammed it on the ground, shattering the screen. The face betrayed just a bit of anger before the TV turned off. 

The TV would never turn on again. It was like I had been excommunicated somehow from TV, from social media, from everything. With a simple gesture I had apparently chosen a side.

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