Inhaling Dread
detailed image description
A photo inside a building looking out at a parking lot and sky. The sky is shockingly, saturatedly orange. The inside of the building is clear lit in a white bordering on austere.
On September 9th, in the height of COVID lockdowns, I woke up and quickly concluded that 2020 had reached climax and the world was ending. Naturally, I had to go into the office that day.
The above photo from that day is untouched, I haven't even fixed the small cropping complaints I have with it, the orange was even more saturated in person. It's probably the best photo I've taken. This was the sky the entire San Francisco Bay area woke up to; our entire world cast in an orange light, unable to see the sun.
I had to bike over two rather large hills to get to my job's soon to be abandoned office to clear my desk's personal items, in a timeslot I had signed up for a month prior to minimize my COVID exposure to colleagues. Of course business MUST proceed as usual, even when every fiber of my being is screaming at me that this is an emergency. Fortunately the air at ground level was, counter to everyone's instincts, pristine. You could do a full cardio routine outside and be fine. The danger was impending, literally looming overhead, suspended by air currents, but not quite touching us yet.
The attitude in the office was... Distraught. Myself and three other colleagues were emptying our desks, picking our way through bins of electronics to find hardware we might've found ourselves needing after six months of work suffusing our homes. What few conversations we had felt like both parties were gently dissociated, everything about our situation seeming so surreal and alien that there was no way it was as close as it felt. The first human contact I'd had in months and we couldn't even find the words to be kind to each other, we were too scared.
On my way out through the lobby I looked south and saw the view above. I won't pretend to have instantly recognized all the meaning and parallels I've found in it about that day and year. I took a minute to line up the photo before getting back on my bike and hauling ass home. The air started to have the occasional hint of smoke in it, I had to book it before the danger reached ground level.