reality chronicles in prime time

by Mileva Anastasiadou

Season One: Volcanic Winter

It’s year 536, and we are poor and sick and frightened. We don’t count years, the years don’t count because it’s dark. We see the sun through dark clouds of dust and ashes and it’s so cold that we will freeze to death or we will starve or we will die from undefined diseases. We don’t know yet but this too shall pass and some of us will live to tell the story, the story of the darkest ages, because even when the light returns, it will be still dark in minds and souls, and this will last but it will end, once we overcome the fear, and we’ll discover new old truths, and hope will prevail and science and love and reason will save us, and someone in the distant future will call this the worst year in history, the darkest of seasons, the start of an era we didn’t see coming while watching the prequel.

Season Two: Blissful Intermission

In modern times the world moves on. We also move on and on and on and we thrive, because fear has been defeated and the light has won the war. We fall in love, have fun, have kids, we study science and make art, and it feels like we’re safe, like we don’t have to fear anymore, because life is easy for some of us but we pretend it’s for all. There are sad side stories that we ignore because the world is ours, this is our own end of history and the show is about to end here. We rest assured that we are now safe and no disaster can ever touch us, we let our guard down, and we can’t wait for our happily ever after, only things change fast, the show is renewed for another season and we are surprised, but not yet worried, we’re only curious to see what may come next.

Season Three: Recrudescence

We start the season with earthquakes, darkness lingers over our heads and it gets hotter and hotter and wildfires spread like cancer. We wonder what happened, what went wrong and the past is clawing its way back, if the narrative was kind of boring and we ran out of stories and we invent crap to keep the show going. The audience demands a happy ending. Only this isn’t a fairy tale, and we hope this is the final season where everything is explained at the end, but the show is promising, addictive, bingeworthy, full of plot twists and tiny climaxes which make it interesting but us frightened, because it still makes no sense at all and we have unlearned fear; we have no idea how to handle this forgotten feeling. Only this isn’t a documentary either. It now feels like a horror show, with evil forces and disasters and greed, and we are the debris of history, of all previous seasons, of what used to be and we took for granted. The show goes on and on and on, so fast-paced that we can’t catch up, and reinvented fear should make us fight or run, but instead we freeze.

All we do now is pretend it’s 536, and we hold on to each other and we bow our heads and we wait and we hope that we’ll live to see the sunshine again and that the light wins before the credits roll.