Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash
by Mileva Anastasiadou
We don’t post. But we log in and check our feed and when Facebook asks what’s on our mind, we think, Beautiful World, Where Are You, then memories pop up like ghosts, and we jump in like we’d jump to find Narnia, into a closet of moments gone but we can open it and try them on again.
We are already gone but we’re still here, still chasing an Intermezzo, a pleasant break, a quick fix before we get back to work and life, then comes the notification that carries us back into the past, and we jump in like we’d jump into the rabbit hole, into a museum of moments gone but we can visit and admire all precious exhibits again.
But we don’t share a thing. We only stare at old photos and posts and songs and we pretend we still are Normal People living in a normal world, not overwhelmed by the news and the lies and the hate, and we only exchange messages and memes sometimes, then we sit still, as if we pray, inside the graveyard of moments gone and now forgotten, because we can’t remember who we were back then.
Back when the world seemed innocent and safe, before Harry Styles said the end was near and Sally Rooney wrote novels, before we changed into this mess and locked the doors and sealed the windows, and we log out, because we hate ourselves when we romanticize the past, when we accept the world has beaten us and time won and we count losses and we lick wounds, when we look back at the time when this thing felt simple, just Conversations with Friends, back when we talked and someone listened.
Mileva Anastasiadou is a neurologist, from Athens, Greece and the author of “Christmas People”. Her work has been selected for the Best Microfiction anthology and Wigleaf Top 50 and can be found in many journals.
