This is the question every adult 30 and up has decided to torment my generation with. When they ask this…in full sincerity what I want to say is I just spent the last year and a half not only surviving a pandemic as my entire world came tumbling down, finding the fucking ambition to push through my depression to attend online college classes with professors incapable of using technology as people my skin color were slowly but surely picked off like flies off an over-ripe fruit. What I want to say is that I feel intensely guilty about still being alive while so many people I know are now dead. Gone. My great aunt. My old math teacher and track coach. The girl I met on a volunteer trip in college. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead as doorknobs. One of my high school friends tells me about her nightmares. She feels like she’s dying. The world is ending. Everything is turning black. The elders in the church she frequents tell everybody about how this is the rapture. The end times. She’s told me before how they denounced the vaccine as “the mark of the beast.” Then the church elders wilted and folded like funeral flowers. One by one they began to die. Everywhere I look I am surrounded by death. When the pandemic began I remember the panic. The fervor. The anxiety. The death. It was everywhere. People just ignored it. I lived in one of the cities that was hit badly during the first waves. Bodies piled up in the morgues. People were dying. They still are. Non-stop 24/7. The morgues got so full they had to put the bodies in refrigerated trucks. They forced prisoners to dig unmarked graves to dump the bodies in. Death was everywhere. But the adults pretend not to notice. They chit-chat about “the future.” They laugh at how “lazy” “this generation” is. I close my eyes and all I can see is my track coach on the news. He’s telling the reporter how he survived Covid after being the first person admitted into the hospital in the city. He’s lost so much weight. Half of his hair is gone shaved completely bald. He talks about being in a coma after getting Covid and how he survived thanks to God. Within a few months of the interview, he’d be dead. I think I hate God. I hate the way people use this imaginary man in the sky who clearly has never given a damn about us here on Earth to explain it all away. The same God the church elders said claimed the vaccine was devilry. The same God who allowed the pandemic to happen in the first place. The same God who watched as the virus not only robbed me of any semblance of normalcy I had but splintered my family even further as my sexist and abusive brother turned into one of those anti-vaxxer conspiracy nuts and my egotistical abusive mother continued to deny the realities of the pandemic. I hate God, I can’t stand adults over 30, and I wish they would leave us all alone. The level of smugness that Americans specifically born in the 1980s possess should be studied by manufacturers and bottled. I moved out of my family’s house last month into a very spacious 1 bedroom apartment for the summer leaving behind all the pain and hurt that had accumulated over the last 22 years of my life. At least for a couple of months before I have to return anyway. So what am I doing other than keeping myself alive you so snidely ask? Absolutely. Fucking. Nothing. And I would implore you to get off my case and do the same.
