“Outside these utopias and dystopias is the real earth where plants still grow, pots simmer on stoves, soil regenerates, spring arrives, rain falls, and people speak to each other and work the land.”
— Dark Mountain, issue 23
I met a Somali woman at the playground who looked at me like I was a guru or a prophet when I told her I didn't have a smartphone—that our children weren't allowed to have screens, either.
She was amazed. And also envious and melancholic, and also wistful. “Oh my god you're so lucky,” she said in a hushed voice, sighing and looking away.
And to be clear, I had just told her about something we didn't have, not something that we did. But our not having it was a kind of luminous treasure in her eyes, a beautiful gap—she wanted one, too.
About her youngest son—who was kind of playing with my children at the playground, but not really—she said, “He doesn't scream when he's tired, or hungry, or thirsty, or lonely, nothing: He only screams when he can't have his phone.”
The woman seemed really, really tired.
And her son—maybe a five or six year old—seemed really confused about where he was.
I tried to be encouraging. “Sometimes I pray for a gigantic solar flare to erupt,” I said. “Sometimes I dream of giant waves of energy smashing down from the sun, turning all of our screens into only so much silicon and plastic rubble.”
When I said that, the woman's shoulders relaxed and she was able to smile again. “Yeah,” she said, nodding.
Then we looked past the trees, past the clouds. We daydreamed of catastrophes falling from the sky, of an entire way of life evaporating in an instant, being demolished by the invisible angels of the heliosphere.
And then it was time for her to take her son to masjid. “Nice to meet you!” she called cheerfully as she left, head still full of smiles.
Because sometimes all you need is a good apocalypse.