In Times of the Most Extreme Symbols

We spend the evening listening to folk songs from the early 2000s. Make a stew. Cut carrots the color of Halloween or your brother’s nail polish. Rib eye and onions. Oyster mushrooms dug out of the earth by some guy at the farmer’s market who always wears a T-shirt with a picture of the Earth on it. As if that means something. As if we’ve forgotten where we are. We remember when we first heard the word organic. First heard text and  meme. GIF and kale. Run and scatter. How proud we were in 2014 that we’d never cheated on our spouses. That we’d never bought a cellphone. How far, now, we’ve strayed from where we thought we had gotten. What we’d become. Which is what, really, but a battered sign on someone else’s highway. All the miles they’ve made from every version of themselves. None of it matters though. Not today. We’ve found ourselves here in 2024 and there’s no search party. No last goodbyes. We grow beards. We learn how to knit. How to thrum some kind of music out of where there are no strings. We sit down to our dinner and the dark presses itself against the windows as if it were hungry. And it is. It always was.