Trying to think of the kind of people we’ll be 15 years from now. We’ll try to live closer to home, or at least try to visit often. We will know what being separated from the people we love with no way to them will look like.

Home will look different too, with families that we built in times of helplessness and crisis surrounding us with love even after the terror passes. We’ll like calls and video and anything that makes the person on the other side tangible, real. We’ll be tired of loving by bytes.

We’ll have hair triggers. So many of us. We’ll be on guard and we’ll find it difficult to accept that things are better. Maybe it will make us kinder. When all of us have seen so much grief, maybe we’ll honour each others’.

We’ll shun loneliness. We’ll remember how much it hurts, being alone in ways that make touch a crime. So we’ll learn how to touch again. We’ll learn how to hold each other only to feel skin against skin. We’ll learn how to love better.

We’ll learn how to love through distances and fights and the abundance of choice- we’ll all have the memory of what love looks like when it feels illicit, so we’ll work to make love easier. We’ll work to make love kinder.

We’ll pay attention to each other because that’s how we survived. We’ll care, worry, and fuss over each other because we know, with deep intimacy earned at top high a price, how wholly dependent we are on each other.

We’ll build on the little, wavering steps we took towards being a people who share. It will be a new language we all know. We’ll learn how to create what we can’t say.

That’s how we survived, isn’t it?

We used every medium available to us and recorded, documented, preserved every emotion we felt. Maybe we’ll find the patience to learn from what we saw.

Maybe we’ll be the people we saw that we were capable of being.