Another Zoom Meeting / Rebecca Kilroy

Another Zoom Meeting

Rebecca Kilroy

They put “meet” in quotation marks. Do you remember when that was funny? No, me neither. “See you there! Well, not see you. ‘Meet’ you there.” In those endless, grid-locked city blocks, storage rooms of thought, Where boxes and voices stack atop each other, And someone is always unmuted who shouldn’t be, but no one is ever muted who should. “Meetings”.

If I were angrier, I would say, How dare you defile the ancient simplicity, the laid-bare bedrock of all human interaction, that is a meeting? To meet used to mean a possibility, a coming together.

We met everywhere and with everyone! Lovers and strangers and friends, Formal and informal and “unplanned”. Like the way I used to meet my high school crush in the hallways “unplanned” as if I hadn’t memorized his schedule. Is there anything more ancient or true than the convoluted means by which an adolescent girl will contrive to meet her crush? How dare you then call these new glass boxes “meetings”?

If I had it in me, I would shatter your “meetings” to glowing shards.

But I don’t. I am tired. Tired as eyes that have looked at a screen too long and forgotten how to see. Tired as my walls must be of being stared at. Tired of pretending. Can we please just stop pretending?

They try so hard sometimes it hurts. I have gone to “coffeeshops” and “dinners” and “teas”, where I sat in my bedroom surreptitiously eating cold ravioli with my video off. Stilted and staring and starving. What if we stopped? Don’t say you haven’t thought about it. We could stop trying to make this normal, stop straining our eyes and our patience. We could stop the nauseating routine of waiting rooms, and mute, unmute, “Can anybody hear me?”

Argue with me if you’d like. I admire anyone who, at this point, has the energy to argue about something like this. But you can’t deny that there are days when you’ve thought we would be better to just let society collapse. And I’ll meet you on the other side.