I went out for just a simple, forgettable errand to grab some fresh produce, nothing more ambitious than that.
I had not even made it fully out of the car. One leg out into the parking lot, door cracked.
The door opens wider, and there was a man crossing the lot, already mid sneeze.
Not the polite kind or the type of you can simply ignore.
This was violent. Expulsive. The kind of sneeze that echoes. No hand to cover and with not the slightest hesitation.
The sneeze surged forward like a shockwave. Air, sound, and every unseen particle carried within it propelled outward in a single, careless instant and cast loose without a second thought that it should have been contained.
10 seconds pass.
He does it again!
The same force with the same, if not more indifference.
Walking straight into the store like it’s nothing. Like none of this pandemic we have been surviving in has ever really happened. He just sneezed outwardly into the air as if we didn’t just live through SEVEN years that were supposed to change something fundamental about how we exist around each other.
What lingered was not just the sneeze itself, but the void it revealed. The place where instinct should have stirred and did not.
The ancient reflex to recoil, to shield and survive, felt stripped clean, as if something essential had been quietly removed.
In its absence, there is now something else. Not chaos, but instead a strange, composed inversion. Behavior that runs counter to every signal that once kept us alive. A calm, almost procedural disregard.
Not a failure of instinct, but it’s suited replacement.
A subtle rewrite, precise and invisible, like code threaded into the marrow, that guides us not toward safety but away from it. And it is done subconsciously, without resistance as if surrender had become the most natural response of all.
I stood there a second too long, keys still pressed into my palm, suspended in the realization that this is what remains. Something fundamental has been overwritten. The instinct to protect, adapt, and survive has been dulled into a quiet willingness to ignore what should never be ignored.
Self destructive patterns move through humanity now with a kind of eerie normalcy, as if they belong here and as if they had always been a part of us.
And it settles into the smallest moments, threading itself through the ordinary, until even a simple trip to buy produce feels like crossing an invisible threshold, into something unspoken that everyone else has agreed not to see.
And when I step back, the wider view is more revealing. It begins to feel as though the danger is no longer what lingers in the air nor what moves through the wastewater, but something far quieter.
As if the instinct for self preservation hasn’t faded, but has been carefully lifted out of us.
The will to want to live is just gone without a trace, leaving behind a gap where survival used to speak.
I had not even made it fully out of the car. One leg out into the parking lot, door cracked.
The door opens wider, and there was a man crossing the lot, already mid sneeze.
Not the polite kind or the type of you can simply ignore.
This was violent. Expulsive. The kind of sneeze that echoes. No hand to cover and with not the slightest hesitation.
The sneeze surged forward like a shockwave. Air, sound, and every unseen particle carried within it propelled outward in a single, careless instant and cast loose without a second thought that it should have been contained.
10 seconds pass.
He does it again!
The same force with the same, if not more indifference.
Walking straight into the store like it’s nothing. Like none of this pandemic we have been surviving in has ever really happened. He just sneezed outwardly into the air as if we didn’t just live through SEVEN years that were supposed to change something fundamental about how we exist around each other.
What lingered was not just the sneeze itself, but the void it revealed. The place where instinct should have stirred and did not.
The ancient reflex to recoil, to shield and survive, felt stripped clean, as if something essential had been quietly removed.
In its absence, there is now something else. Not chaos, but instead a strange, composed inversion. Behavior that runs counter to every signal that once kept us alive. A calm, almost procedural disregard.
Not a failure of instinct, but it’s suited replacement.
A subtle rewrite, precise and invisible, like code threaded into the marrow, that guides us not toward safety but away from it. And it is done subconsciously, without resistance as if surrender had become the most natural response of all.
I stood there a second too long, keys still pressed into my palm, suspended in the realization that this is what remains. Something fundamental has been overwritten. The instinct to protect, adapt, and survive has been dulled into a quiet willingness to ignore what should never be ignored.
Self destructive patterns move through humanity now with a kind of eerie normalcy, as if they belong here and as if they had always been a part of us.
And it settles into the smallest moments, threading itself through the ordinary, until even a simple trip to buy produce feels like crossing an invisible threshold, into something unspoken that everyone else has agreed not to see.
And when I step back, the wider view is more revealing. It begins to feel as though the danger is no longer what lingers in the air nor what moves through the wastewater, but something far quieter.
As if the instinct for self preservation hasn’t faded, but has been carefully lifted out of us.
The will to want to live is just gone without a trace, leaving behind a gap where survival used to speak.
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