The room was mostly dark but, with a digital spark, there was a dull light. In the shadows, pixels started to bloom like digital lilies. A shiny, clean face emerged on a screen, like an apparitional copy designed for the dark hours of the day. I could not tear myself away from it, mesmerized by its shine, the immensity of distance between it and anything that felt real stretching in front of me. A thought, quiet and insidious, filled my head: Are you for real?
It was not about factual accuracy or whether what we were being fed was destiny’s script. It felt like a necessity to tear away the masks we were beginning to wear to truly see behind what seemed so real at a glance. We learned to edit our sorrows until every painful angle had been rounded away until no shard of truth, sharp and stinging, remained. We were stuck in an ever-present state of ‘almost’ and ‘almost but not quite,’ flailing about in the static and the fear.
I understood then that lies are a slow, silent corrosion. They ate away at the very cement of meaning and in the process took away connection, relationship, every tie between us. Now we were adrift in a digital pond and floundering about in uncertainty. If our reality could be moulded at the swipe of a finger across a screen, if the voice of logic grew fainter with every passing hour, what was the point of what we felt, even if we could not recognize it as authentic?
We needed the sharp edges back, the grime and the grit of untamed truth in a world that would not stop hurtling. We needed firm footing to stand firmly in the mad, whirling world. Truth was the anchor to keep us from sinking into the vast void of emptiness. It was weighty, and invaluable, and untarnished like gold, a commodity that could not possibly bend or break under the onslaught of deception that had been inflicted upon us.
I came to think that, at that point, the questions needed to be loud enough, sharp enough, to challenge what was being so eagerly peddled to us. When the world was just an empty film reel, maybe the one thing you had to do was to look a person in the eye and demand, “Are you for real?” Not to collect statistics or confirm the obvious, but simply to find genuine souls that had, in their entirety, kept the sanctity of their own beings from the pervading sham.
Beyond the pixels and the blur and the dazzle-beyond the illusions that we had perfected-there was an essence we needed to discover, an energy that made us real, a thrum and pulse of raw being. It was about saying, with all we had to give and nothing to hide: We are for real.