After Us

When they’re gone, I’ll be alone. Not because they love me—anyone can love from a distance—but because they fight for me. One is living through a war. One is watching her husband forget her, piece by piece, and still gets up. One has known me since I was fourteen. And my partner, who carries his own weight and, sometimes, mine too.

I know what that costs them. I know I’m lucky.

The war has begun again. It sits on my chest like something I swallowed wrong.

I live among people who’ve made peace with other people’s suffering—people who look at a woman and see a body to legislate, who look at the deaths of children and still choose the gun. Above them are those with power, wrapped in it, untouched by the consequences of what they govern.

But it isn’t the cruelty that guts me.

It’s the shrug.

The people who’ve decided their voice doesn’t matter, so why use it. Apathy is cruelty’s quiet accomplice.

I’m tired. Yet, I’m still determined. I don’t believe this is our ceiling.

There has to be something better waiting for the ones who come after us.

Image | 2026