The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
The damage is not what you think it is.
It is not dread. Dread is clean — it stays where you put it, it doesn't touch the furniture. What is happening right now in living rooms and group chats and the quiet behind people's eyes is something softer and more ruinous than dread. It is the feeling of a room half-rearranged.
We moved things. You know what I mean. Some of us moved things tentatively, a chair nudged six inches, a possibility opened and not fully committed to. Others went further — they cleared whole walls in their minds, stood back, imagined the light differently. This is what belief does when it is allowed to. It redecorates.
And now we are standing in it.
The sofa is at the wrong angle. The old arrangement is gone and the new one is not finished and the room looks worse than it did before we started, which is the specific grief of this moment — not that we dared, but that we got far enough into the daring to make a mess of the place.
Brazil are coming. Miami is waiting with its enormous sky and its indifference to what Scotland needs.
I don't know what happens in that room. I know we are already in it. I know we moved the furniture and we cannot quite bring ourselves to move it back, which means we have to finish what we started.
The room is not beautiful yet. It could be.