Avoidance

 

January twentieth, two thousand twenty five..."Hey, it's nine o'clock.  Are you ready?"  My son ambled from his room to the couch, snuggling in under a fleece blanket while I clicked through the options on the Firestick to get to the Disney channel.  Our wifi is super-laggy, and it takes awhile for streaming video to load.

We settled in for a day of binge-watching "WandaVision".  Neither of us had seen it yet; he seemed to know more about the premise than I did.  I didn't take me long, though, to figure out that this was a story about immense grief and the lengths we can go to avoid the pain and heartbreak.  Having superpowers can't shield you from the agony, but it can amplify the actions of the aggrieved to Marvel-movie-worthy proportions.

The irony did not escape me.  There we were, avoiding all mainstream television and most social media--avoidance as an act of self-care.  We will continue to work towards an inclusive, kinder, more loving world where people are judged only by their character, and those who lack it are no longer in places of power...but in the meantime, we rest, Firestick in hand, in lieu of a magical force field.