Adena M'lynn's Voice

By Adena M’lynn  We didn’t lose it in a war. We listed it.   Quietly, at first. A small print notice at the bottom of the page. Terms subject to change.   We sold minutes of attention. Then hours. Then whole days of labor  that never came home  with us. We sold the word citizen and replaced it with consumer because it sounded lighter in the mouth and didn’t require responsibility.   We sold the idea of common good for convenience, then blamed the poor for not affording it.   We sold prisons as solutions, schools as problems, and called suffering a personal failure to keep the balance sheet clean.   We sold safety by the headline. Fear by the cycle. Outrage by the click.   We sold bodies in uniform to contracts we never read, sent them back folded into flags, and called it honor instead of accounting.   We sold children their future in installments— test scores, debt, a climate that won’t wait for them to graduate.   We sold truth to...

It feels like we are nearing obsolescence. Not abruptly— but by increments we applaud. We artificialed our lives early. Enhanced flavor first. Butter that was no longer butter, yet we consumed it anyway. Convenience taught us to swallow replacements as if they were progress. Then images learned to lie convincingly. Movies made the fabricated feel earned, the impossible familiar. Our appetite adjusted.  It always does, eventually. We wanted more. We demanded less cost and time. We called it efficiency. And we worked hard— to make the imitation indistinguishable from the real.   Measured. Documented. Shared like a trivia game. A fact we receive with a shrug and a joke. I say I shouldn’t stand too close— because laughter keeps panic  from spilling. Artificial intelligence did not arrive suddenly. It has been here, quietly fed. We trained it with our desires, our speed,  and  insistence on endless consumption. We are not being replaced. We are acting willingly....

  by Adena M’lynn They say time only moves forward— but that’s a lie my body knows better than my brain. Because some days, I swear I feel the hands of yesterday wrapped around my ankles, dragging me backwards through years I worked hard to outrun. I’m grown now… with bills and keys and a mailbox full of things that pretend I’m whole. But inside, there’s still that small girl with knees pressed into carpet, breathing like she’s praying, counting the seconds between footsteps in the hallway like her life depends on getting to ten before the doorknob turns. And it always turned before she got to ten. Memory is a cruel magician— pulling me onto the stage, spotlight hot against my cheeks, whispering  “Watch closely.” Then it saws me in half again. Suddenly I’m back there, in the house where shadows knew my name. But not all of it was shadow. Because sometimes— right in the middle of the terror— a softer memory slips in, like mercy with a scent. Strawberry soap. My Nana’s hands was...