This time she conquers the digital maze and lasts at least 8 secs with the mechanical bull

I have a distinct memory of being told of an event about which I have no memory: I am in Oshkosh overalls, shirtless, brown toddler body and ringlets of blonde hair, playing behind a ring of bales of hay. The bull is out and the family that is babysitting me can’t find me. I am clueless, in the reverie of pretend play and the only lived moment of the present that is the only lived moment ever for a child like me. I get pulled out of the reverie and back to my powerlessness when a strong hand with a steady grip plucks me from the ground and runs with me, strung up like a fish on a line, to the nearest outbuilding. I am told - or else I conjure up this detail to help make sense of why I was uprooted - that the bull was panting and snorting and pawing the ground outside the ring of bales.

If she had only had a drone, and

of the maze had made a game

Much less strife might have been sown

and her calling could have saved her name.

She should have could have might have done

Those dirty deeds with Zeus’s son

Her body minded, it kept full score

She long outfoxed the Minotaur.

When it comes time to pull on the thread of memory, and remember what these days and nights felt like, there will be a greater or lesser tendency to fall into the rhythms of coherent declaration and speak in dulcet tones of soothsaying hindsight. And it will take someone brave to shout out that nearly everyone was clueless and beholden to that ignorance, like a moral cripple is beholden to the unfairness of affliction. “We had no idea what might come,” if said, will be poorly understood, because it will have came, come what may, and the equal parts of its promise and its wreckage will have already become encoded in the minds of parties whose poor understanding will hold us in good stead, I hope. I hope.