The world as we know it began to fray around the edges in 2020, and then with each ensuing rotation of the earth, life unravelled faster and faster. We sat in our homes while the borders closed. We sat in front of our screens and watched, for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, as the life left George Floyd. We watched the green jacket of Sarah Everard on her last seen images float down the streets of London, never to be seen, or worn, again. We watched the women of Afghanistan disappear, their voices snuffed out one by one. We all saw the bruised and beaten images of Mahsa Amini in her hospital bed before she died. We have watched as the Palestinians have been killed and starved over, and over, and over again.
Our eyes are red-rimmed. We have become exposed nerves. We have stared, horrified, for the last five years, as everything we thought we knew about humanity and compassion, about progress and liberalism, about disaster and history, has been turned upside down.