This Is the Aftermath of Your Favorite Delusion

“First, Do No Harm” Was a Suggestion

Photo by Barthelemy de Mazenod on Unsplash

Prologue

The overture doesn't begin. It fractures. In a key no human throat could hum without bleeding. Not B-flat. Not C-minor. Something older. Something carved from cartilage and shadow. Something that predates music and mocks notation. If God had a hangnail, it would sound like this.

Skyscrapers don’t collapse. They sag. Like exhausted vertebrae after a twelve-hour shift listening to someone’s cousin explain what ADHD actually is. Their glass eyes weep condensation. Their steel guts ache with the fatigue of holding up a world that never said thank you, only "circle back Monday."

The wind? Malicious. It doesn’t breeze; it indicts. It blows through the exposed wiring of once-humming conference rooms, chewing the last remnants of purpose from the tangled cords of ergonomic chairs. It hums not with breath but with the guttural throat-clearing of a god who’s done explaining.

Linoleum screams now. It used to squeak politely. But after decades of holding up under worksheets and IEPs and recess detentions for not making eye contact, it’s lost all patience. No one claps at the end of the school day. But at 2:45, hearts still seize like elevators dropping.

There are pages, hundreds of them, flapping through the abandoned air vents. Intake forms. Referral letters. Parent communication logs signed in barely legible trauma font. The pages groan with the weight of every “unfortunately” and every “your child is not meeting expectations.” They curl at the corners like they're embarrassed to be paper.

The elevator opens to nowhere. Inside, a ghost clears its throat and tries, valiantly, to rephrase a basic human need into something that won’t trigger legal liability. Its voice climbs, catches, then dissipates into the polyester carpet like breath into a pillow nobody cries into anymore.

Listen. Seriously. Shut up for one second and listen. That whine? That high-pitched keen that oscillates just above plausible deniability? That’s the sound of potential, muzzled. The sound of a brilliant child mouthing "I don’t know" because that answer gets fewer punishments. It's what happens when curiosity gets put on a sticker chart.

---

they didn’t shoot us, they just filed us.
gave our pain a barcode,
sedated our storms,
and called it progress.

Chaotic Goodisms

~V

Right, so here’s the thing, and I’m saying this like we’re seated at some busted diner table that still smells like cigarettes and regret, both of which are yours, and I’m trying very hard not to sound smug, even though I accidentally ordered an oat milk latte and you haven’t stopped glaring at it like it insulted your mother.

The city? It didn’t collapse in fire. It didn’t get blitzed by bombs or swallowed by sinkholes or any of the poetic ends you’d scrawl on bar napkins in your more romantic moods. No. It slow dripped into silence. Leaked out through the air vents. Slipped into obsolescence with the quiet confidence of bureaucracy. It didn’t die heroically. It filled out the proper forms and waited its turn. Died politely. Bureaucratically.

You’d have hated it. Too tidy. Too beige.

See, first came the schools, where they broke the kids not with whips or fists, but with rubrics. With color-coded charts and standardized scores. They stamped out the stimming, the blinking, the questions that looped like violin solos (major chords, not minor. They loved the major chords). They benchmarked the joy out of them. Annotated the wonder. Labeled the kids who blinked too fast or thought in spirals. Sent home the ones who hummed when they read or rocked when they listened. If the brilliance didn’t flatten out, it got flagged for “further evaluation.”

Then came the clinics. Not salvation. Not healing. Not even anesthesia. Just paperwork. Just clipboards filled with quiet little murders, like execution orders. Just a conveyor belt of diagnoses dressed up in concern. Orange bottles like sacrament. Pills meant to shave off the parts that didn’t sit still or make eye contact or follow conversational turn-taking protocols. Pills that turned brilliance into something quieter. Something measurable. Something insurable.

They called it “care.” And that, is the punchline. That’s the absurdity you’d love if it didn’t make you want to vomit. They sedated the gifted. They pathologized the sensitive. They named storms “disorders” and expected the weather to apologize.

You want a picture of it? Picture a kid, seven years old, maybe. Sees sound. Tastes voices. Draws galaxies in crayon and calls them “Wednesday.” That kid ends up on a behavior plan. Gets sent home for noncompliance. By twelve, he’s got three diagnoses and a daily pill sorter. By sixteen, he can’t remember the last time he daydreamed without guilt. By eighteen, he’s a data point in someone’s success metric, because he didn’t die that year. Because he did not die. Can you fathom it.

That’s what they call thriving now. Not dying.

The clinics hum with the sound of fluorescent regret. The offices buzz like insects. Therapists take notes with eyes glazed from too many mandatory trainings and whisper like it’s a church. The doctors tweak doses like DJs at a funeral. Everyone’s very professional, very calm. You can’t scream in a credentialed tone, apparently. Doesn’t look good on the intake form.

Nature didn’t reclaim the city gently. No dandelions growing from keyboards. No foxes strolling the parking lots. She came in like a riot. Vines strangled waiting rooms. Ivy tore down job postings stapled to bulletin boards. Moss curled over mission statements like it was reclaiming heretics.

The buildings slouch now. They sag under the weight of a thousand IEP meetings that all began with, “Your child is having trouble adjusting.” They look embarrassed. Like they know they held too many meetings where the only real takeaway was: “Can your kid please just stop being weird in public?”

And the kids. Christ, the kids. They learned to disappear. To script. To apologize for existing too vividly. They understood early, too early, that difference is dangerous, that joy needs a leash, that the loudest way to survive is to disappear. They got good at it. Masters of invisibility. PhDs in masking. Silence like currency. By adulthood, they could simulate normal so well even their therapists didn’t notice they were dying inside PowerPoints.

Now they’re adults. Sort of. They hold jobs. Kind of. Walking trauma responses with LinkedIn profiles. They attend webinars. They answer emails. They use exclamation marks to feign enthusiasm. They say, “per my last” instead of “I’m exhausted.” They say, “touching base” instead of “please see me.” They cry in parked cars and call it coping. And then they come home and fall apart in ways that don’t fit neatly on a wellness app.

And you know what the system says? It says: Try yoga. Try gratitude. Try better compliance. Try mindfulness. Try hydration. Try harder.

It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to chain-smoke in reverse just to purge it out of your lungs.

This city isn’t a community. It’s a case study. A fossilized monument to the war on difference. Every squeaky swing, every rotting desk, every laminated poster peeling from a guidance counselor’s office wall tells the same story: You were too much. And we preferred you less.

They didn’t break bones. They broke brilliance. They erased the loud, the lateral, the nonlinear. They called it support while training everyone to become smaller, quieter, easier to manage.

This isn’t a ruin. It’s a receipt. Itemized. Dated. Signed by the same hands that now pretend none of it happened.

Always pretending it never happened.

You’d write it like this: They beat the kids without touching them. They drugged the prophets and called it customer service. They planted bombs in the form of expectations, then punished everyone for stepping on them.

And the sky? Oh, the sky has given up the charade. It doesn't blush; it hemorrhages. Every cloud a ghost of a possibility redacted in the final draft. Metal rain. Glass thunder. Condensation shaped like the kid who never got picked for group work.

What’s left? Not rubble. Restraint, ossified. A mausoleum for brilliance mislabeled as dysfunction.

What’s gone? Not brokenness. Not even loss. What’s gone is wonder. What’s gone is what could’ve been if the world hadn’t stapled every original thought to a disciplinary referral.

And what remains? The faint echo of a civilization that kept asking why no one was dancing while it beat the music out of every last child who dared to feel.

Me? I just sit here with my lukewarm latte and try not to cry into the foam. Because somewhere under all the policy memos and missed appointments, something still pulses. Not hope. Hope’s been chloroformed.